"Painfully skewed priorities?" Is Fred Hiatt's shop getting uneasy?

at least we're not hearing about the "latitude" the administration "needs" to "successfuly" wage the "global war on terror..."

President Bush rarely visits Congress. So it was a measure of his painfully skewed priorities that Mr. Bush made the unaccustomed trip yesterday to seek legislative permission for the CIA to make people disappear into secret prisons and have information extracted from them by means he dare not describe publicly.

Of course, Mr. Bush didn't come out and say he's lobbying for torture. Instead he refers to "an alternative set of procedures" for interrogation. But the administration no longer conceals what it wants. It wants authorization for the CIA to hide detainees in overseas prisons where even the International Committee of the Red Cross won't have access. It wants permission to interrogate those detainees with abusive practices that in the past have included induced hypothermia and "waterboarding," or simulated drowning. And it wants the right to try such detainees, and perhaps sentence them to death, on the basis of evidence that the defendants cannot see and that may have been extracted during those abusive interrogation sessions.

i'm personally very happy that the 15 senators on the committee had the huevos to stand up to george's intense push in spite of a personal arm-twisting visit, but i think the fight isn't over, not by a long shot...

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