Administration pulls another document dump -- is this document boarding of the press?

The barkeep over at Whiskey Bar tries to make some sense of which documents the WH suddenly deemed not so "secret" after all, what those documents tell us, and what documents may still be in the deep freeze, such as anything from later in 2003, when the insurgency erupted in Iraq and demands for "better intelligence" there ratcheted up.

According to Sy Hersh, this is when the Pentagon extended "Copper Green" - the Pentagon's existing secret program for capturing and interrogating high-ranking Al Qaeda operatives - to Iraq.

It's possible Hersh was off base on that story - fed a line by Rumsfeld's opponents at the CIA, or misinterpreting the bits and pieces of information he collected. Certainly, that's the Pentagon's argument. But it's obvious that any serious effort to get to the bottom of the torture scandal will have to look carefully at the legal paperwork issued after the period covered by yesterday's document dump. It will also need to probe for any documents the administration may have held back, including any covert presidential findings. Those are almost certainly the key pieces of the puzzle.

Will that effort be made? Almost certainly not. Having dumped its paper load, the administration no doubt will declare the controversy over - as will its allies in Congress. And the Pentagon no doubt will do what it can within the military justice system to stonewall or short circuit the discovery demands of the defense attorneys for the six Abu Ghraib MPs charged in the case. Meanwhile, the Army's investigation of the chain of command in Bagdhad will continue - but slooooowwwly. And, gradually, editors will begin pressuring reporters to turn their attentions to fresher stories, preferably ones that don't outrage the patriotic sensibilities of their readers and viewers.

Billmon may be correct there, but I'm hopeful that there still may be another "Pentagon Papers" out there that will be exposed by a JAG or CIA operative disgusted by this administration's (and senior military commanders') decision to erase the "bright lines" against the sort of "practices" used in Afghanistan, Guantanamo, and Iraq, and then to cover their respective asses once the "practices" began to be exposed.