Political Comment (Followup)

Yesterday I wrote a brief post about Dick Cheney selectively using classified information to bolster his case in favor of torture. That's a lot easier to do if you've taken a hand in destroying documents that may not conform with your way of looking at things. Last night on the Rachel Maddow Show, former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice's counsel, Philip Zelikow, was on to talk about how the White House actively sought out and destroyed copies of a memo he drafted offering a legal opinion at odds with those that justified the use of torture. The idea clearly was to insure that in any future investigations (whether legislative, journalistic, or even criminal), it would appear that there was a consensus of opinion on the matter within the administration and among its legal advisors, and no evidence otherwise. The destruction of records certainly doesn't rise to the same level of immorality as the practice of torture, but it's easy to see that once you've decided to engage in the latter, then all other questionable acts become awfully easy to rationalize.