Sidney Blumenthal writes for Salon.com:

June 1, 2005  |  President Bush's press conference on Tuesday, at which he denounced Amnesty International's annual report containing allegations of torture by the United States as "absurd" and dismissed all such allegations as inspired by terrorists, was the crescendo of a concerted administration campaign to stifle the rising clamor on its torture policy.

[...]

Immediately, the Bush administration launched a ferocious counteroffensive to obscure any debate about its torture policy, discrediting Amnesty's report, which was largely based on previously released official documents. The seriousness with which the administration regards the torture issue -- as a political matter -- was reflected by the senior level of the deniers. Now, the questions were not left to the likes of press secretaries Di Rita or Scott McClellan. All the voices sang in a choir from a common book of talking points. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice hit Amnesty's report as "absurd." Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Richard Myers called the report "absolutely irresponsible." And Vice President Cheney took umbrage at the insult: "Frankly, I was offended by it. For Amnesty International to suggest that somehow the United States is a violator of human rights, I frankly just don't take them seriously." He added that the "allegations of mistreatments" came from "somebody who had been inside and released to their home country and now are peddling lies."

The Wurlitzer of the conservative media was playing from the same songbook, but in a higher octave. On May 27, before the administration heavyweights made their statements, the Wall Street Journal's editorial page declared that the human rights report is "one more sign of the moral degradation of Amnesty International," which it labeled a "highly politicized pressure group" whose reports "amount to pro-al Qaeda propaganda."

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Bush repeated himself again: "It's just an absurd allegation." Once again, he claimed nothing had gone amiss. "In terms of the detainees, we've had thousands of people detained. We've investigated every single complaint against the detainees." Every complaint, he assured his audience, was false because the motives of the detainees are as evil as his are pure: "It seemed like to me they based some of their decisions on the word of -- and the allegations by -- people who were held in detention, people who hate America." Here, Bush turned lexicographer: "people that had been trained in some instances to disassemble -- that means not tell the truth." In conclusion he banged again on his drum: "And so it was an absurd report. It just is."

It may be of minor ironic interest that before the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration cited Amnesty International's reports on Saddam Hussein's violations of human rights as unimpeachable texts. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld often claimed Amnesty as his ultimate authority. Now, inexplicably, Amnesty has gone over to the side of the devil. (On Wednesday, Rumsfeld assailed Amnesty as "reprehensible" and losing "any claim to objectivity or seriousness." But he admitted that some detainees have been mistreated, "sometimes grievously." Thus, according to the secretary of defense, they were not all "disassembling.")

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The conflict over that policy has pit Bush's civilian ideologues against much of the military and the national security apparatus. The policy was developed after Sept. 11, 2001, by a small group of political appointees clustered in the Office of Legal Counsel of the Department of Justice and the White House Counsel's Office. All were part of the tight-knit network of the right-wing Federalist Society, and shared contempt in principle for international law. These legal cadres produced a stream of memos arguing that the United States was not bound by the Geneva Conventions on torture, that torture even unto death was an acceptable technique, and that the president as commander in chief was beyond the confines of legal restrictions in war.