First thing we do is, "freeze out" the Lawyers In the wake of the Abu Ghraib torture pictures we heard from a Republican Congressman and JAG reservist that he personally volunteered to be a JAG advisor in Iraq and was denied. Then we had Lindsey Graham, the Mr. Rogers of the religious right, who realizes just how important the allegations of Abu Ghraib are and has emerged as the Republican we Democrats love - just a tad less than John McCain. Graham has repeatedly said that he believes this goes about a handful of privates and sergeants. Not surprisingly Graham is a former JAG and is still in the reserve JAG corps. Now comes more detail of just how upset the military justice folks in the Pentagon were about what they were seeing in the treatment of detainees and being frozen out of proceedings in Iraq. These heroes (yes, heroic lawyers -- and not just because Catherine Bell is smokin') came forward and gave momentum toward undoing what was occurring in Abu Ghraib and throughout the growing American Gulag system. From today's Newsday:

A little more than a year ago, Scott Horton, chairman of the New York City bar association's Committee on International Human Rights Law, got a call "out of the blue" from an intermediary who wanted to arrange an off-the-record meeting with some high-ranking military lawyers. Horton, in response, held two sessions with eight "very senior" legal officers from the Judge Advocate General's corps. They were, he says, "very circumspect" because most of what they wanted to discuss was highly classified. But their message was clear. New rules governing interrogation and the application of the Geneva Conventions in the war on terror were coming down from the civilian side of the Pentagon. JAG officers had been cut out of the loop. And they were very concerned. "They were very specific in saying there is a policy coming from the top creating an atmosphere of legal ambiguity surrounding the interrogation process that serves no legitimate function and carries grave risks," Horton recalls. "They made it very clear they wanted the bar to raise its voice about this."

Rumsfeld has often expressed frustration over the "lawyers" mucking up expeditious action, and how lawyers complicate things. Combined with all the items coming out now, it is becoming more and more obvious that Donald Rumsfeld and to an extent Bush himself have fallen victim to the weakness too apparent in many conservative arguments. Praising how we are a government of laws, yet detesting those laws at the same time as bothersome restrictions.