The notes would be bad because they might reveal what really happened, how things really got done and at what cost. It was such an obvious risk and of concern to so many people that the caution to throw notes away made it very early into the appropriate manual. Then they hid the manual and its procedure behind a now torn cloak of secrecy.

If the risks were so obvious, why was so much care and attention devoted to avoiding their disclosure rather than curing the underlying problem?

I call the Army’s approach the General Motors Response. Decades ago (time is relative in the Pentagon), it used to be said (by a former GM vice president and Pentagon official) that what’s good for the Pentagon is good for GM (and its other industrial suppliers) – and vice versa. Substitute Blackwater and the secret intel “community” and you’re up to date.

It wasn’t much of a stretch for Japanese engineers, and the expatriate American engineers that Detroit wouldn’t listen to, to point out that fixing problems after they happen isn’t as efficient as rooting them out at the source. Is it cheaper to repaint the blistered hood on every third car off the assembly line – or to fix the paint line?

The Pentagon is still laboriously repainting hoods. Here, in the form of hiding what it readily recognized was dangerous, probably illegal conduct in order to bolster its “legal” claims against its prisoners. The idea that it might establish better legal claims against enemies intent on doing physical harm — and that it should release hundreds or thousands of people it has no valid reason to detain — seems as foreign to this administration as the idea that it might be healthy to pull its drinking water upstream from where it goes potty. Its failure to do that results in intestinal diseases, in the form of legal and moral corruption, that plague the entire community, not just the Pentagon and its political masters.

The more the administration tries to rush these trials, the worse it is going to be for them down the line.

Of course, they were really looking for a sound byte for “Der Factor” that would demonstrate that Moyers is a commie pinko.

Edward R. Murrow told his generation of journalists, no one can eliminate their prejudices. Just recognize them.