He had a conscience, he just didn't feel compelled to use it

On the Rachel Maddow show Tuesday night, Philip Zelikow discussed his lone memo of dissent among all the pro-torture memos that floated around in the Bush administration.

At the time he was counsel for Condoleezza Rice. When he saw the torture memos (courtesy of The Huffington Post), he was of the opinion that they represented a "distorted view of the law" (shocking), and felt compelled to do something about it. And what was his grand gesture? Another memo. Forget the fact that the operation was classified, so only a few people even knew of its existence, so that only a few people would see the memos in the first place. Zelikow was so bothered by the twisted representation of the law, that he wrote down his own version. I don't exactly picture Jerry Maguire's midnight mission statement that turns up in the mailboxes of his entire company. I picture a few sheets of paper on government letterhead, sent to a select group of people.

In all fairness, Zelikow says that the administration tried to squash his attempts to shine the light of truth into the murky Bush darkness. But when Rachel asked him if he would have done something more drastic, like resigning? No, he said. It wasn't like that, apparently. It was really just a cordial disagreement between some lawyers who interpreted the law (for which there was really no precedent) differently.

And then we have House Minority Leader John Boehner confirming that the "harsh interrogation tactics" (or insert other euphemism of choice) are really just torture techniques. Boehner disagrees with the decision to leak the documents. He thinks that those unfriendly to the US could take advantage of this information:

When it comes to what our interrogation techniques are going to be or should be, I'm not going to disclose, nor should anyone have a conversation about what those techniques ought to be. It's inappropriate. All it does is give our enemies more information about us than they need.

So... we should just not talk about the illegal things we're doing? Well, that mindset certainly works in other areas of our government, not just our defense agencies. At least we're keeping it consistent.