Members of Bush’s policy team met with the former president in Dallas this week. Former Press Secretary Scott McClellan says that this meeting was about framing the Bush era policy decisions to establish a rosy view of his legacy, using the same strategies they used to sell us the Iraq war in the first place.
It seems like Obama won’t let them control the framing though… This week also saw the release of another key part of Bush’s legacy, the Justice Department memos (in part by John Yoo) that justified a number of “enhanced interrogation techniques”… otherwise known as torture. I won’t get into many of the specifics because they are soul-wrenching. Link: Bush torture memos released
One detail of this story, is that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in one month. (March 2003). The Bush legacy will firmly include these atrocities in my mind, no matter what the “history” that Bush thinks will someday vindicate him decides. Now we will watch to see what the Bush farm team comes up with for spin, but I don’t think the tricks that got us into Iraq are going to work again.
