RTFA and other acronyms

Apparently, Andrew Sullivan, who is a very smart man, has to go back to school and take some remedial reading comprehension. Sullivan misinterprets WaPo's editorial about the prisoner situation at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib, although WaPo does a good job helping him along. I say 'prisoner situation' because, in my opinion, the only definition of torture is anything that causes physical suffering on the prisoner. Any sort of mental games, threats, and things to that effect would be completely allowed. Thus, using snarling dogs, for instance, would be perfectly acceptable to me, though, because physical suffering would be unacceptable, its efficacy would be called into question.

Anyway, back to the point. It seems like Sullivan's zeal in bringing down Rumsfeld is so great that he misreads the editorial. In it, WaPo claims that Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller is potentially guilty of lying about what he did and when he did it and implies that Rumsfeld had a hand in Abu Ghraib, which Sullivan believes wholeheartedly. At the heart of it though, the only issue is that Miller may have lied about whether his team at Abu Ghraib in August 2003 recommended the actions that sent several low-level military personnel to jail after Rumsfeld had revised interrogation rules in April of the same year. Rumsfeld is, as of right now, still totally in the clear regarding Abu Ghraib, since he specifically disallowed such actions before Miller was sent to Abu Ghraib, a fact Sullivan willfully ignores.

Got that? And we still haven't determined whether the Rumsfeld-approved interrogation policies of December 2002 were illegal or not, even though Sullivan believes it as given.