Hiding the gulag

"Rumsfeld must know that getting lawyers to lie to judges, especially Supreme Court justices, is not easy; any lawyer caught doing so would be disgraced and probably disbarred. And he surely realized that if the high court learned of the human-rights violations in Abu Ghraib, it would severely undercut the administration’s requests for near-absolute executive autonomy in the war on terror. It would particularly undermine the government’s position in the Guantánamo case, where the government has argued that the courts should not have authority even to ask what goes on behind the barbed wire. So the OSG was almost certainly kept out of the loop and sent in ignorance to argue the cases before the justices."