'05 Memo Steamed Rummy

The New York Times reports today that back in June, 2005, then-acting deputy defense secretary Gordon England and State Department counselor Philip Zelikow jointly wrote a 9-page memo calling on the Administration to ask Congress for approval of its detainee treatment policies. England and Zelikow also "called for a return to the minimum standards of treatment in the Geneva Conventions and for eventually closing the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The time had come, they said, for suspects in the 9/11 plot to be taken out of their secret prison cells and tried before military tribunals."

This memo, which the Times says has not been disclosed publicly before now, made SecDef Rumsfeld so angry when he received it that "his aides gathered up copies of the document and had at least some of them shredded." "England's wings got clipped after that," the report quotes one aide as saying; Rumsfeld was displeased that he'd "worked on the memorandum with officials outside the Pentagon without his authorization."

It was only a matter of time before things like this started to appear - surely we've all known that there had to be some dissenters within the Administration to some of the steps that have been taken. Whether this release will open the floodgates or not remains to be seen, but I expect this won't be the last such document that makes its way into the public eye.