Sydney Blumenthal writes in Salon about how the Bush administration's self-righteous reaction to the Amnesty International report hurts U.S. national interests.

And the NYT's Thomas L. Friedman wonders whether the legacy of 9/11 will be an erosion of the ideals that made America special.

First, from Salon: (free with a day pass)

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.")

Bush's press conference talking points apparently did not prepare him to engage particulars of the new Amnesty report: that even after the Supreme Court ruling in Rasul vs. Bush, "no detainee had had the lawfulness of his detention judicially reviewed"; that in Afghanistan, "the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) had access only to some detainees in Bagram and Kandahar air bases"; and that "refusal or failure of the US authorities to clarify the whereabouts or status of the detainees, leaving them outside the protection of the law for a prolonged period, clearly violated the standards of the UN Declaration on the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance." For Bush, it seems, the devil is not in the details.

By training his fire on the new enemy -- Amnesty International, suddenly transformed from a do-gooder into an enabler of evildoers -- Bush seeks to obscure those who opposed the implementation of his torture policy: then Secretary of State Colin Powell, the senior military, the Judge Advocate General Corps and the FBI. ...

... Bush's statement at his press conference on his torture policy is more than a case study of how his White House markets its "products." It reveals his fundamental misunderstanding of the political dimension of the war on terrorism and his failure to grasp the full range of instruments available to advance America's national interest. Bush imagines that his high-flown rhetoric about the "march of democracy" amounts to international diplomacy, but he has no concern for how people abroad can be expected to react to the continuing reports on torture. For him, any opposition becomes further proof of the righteousness of his cause. Bush has faith that he can dictate what should be perceived as fact even when it collides with facts on the ground. The talking points about his virtue prepared by his staff play to his vanity. But as he postures for the domestic political market, he undermines America's national interest in the world.

Friedman's NYT piece:

We urgently need a national commission to look at all the little changes we have made in response to 9/11 - from visa policies to research funding, to the way we've sealed off our federal buildings, to legal rulings around prisoners of war - and ask this question: While no single change is decisive, could it all add up in a way so that 20 years from now we will discover that some of America's cultural and legal essence - our DNA as a nation - has become badly deformed or mutated?

This would be a tragedy for us and for the world. Because, as I've argued, where birds don't fly, people don't mix, ideas don't get sparked, friendships don't get forged, stereotypes don't get broken, and freedom doesn't ring.