BUSH OFFICIALS ATTEMPTING TO WATER DOWN ETHICS REPORT.

The Washington Post reports that former Bush officials who are the subject of an internal Justice Department ethics report on lawyers who justified torture are attempting to water down its ultimate findings:

Former Bush administration officials are launching a behind-the-scenes lobbying campaign to urge Justice Department leaders to soften an ethics report criticizing lawyers who blessed harsh detainee interrogation tactics, according to two sources familiar with the efforts.

In recent days, attorneys for the subjects of the ethics probe have encouraged senior Bush administration appointees to write and phone Justice Department officials, said the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the process is not complete.

This begs the question: if the officials in question wrote the memos in good faith, as they claim, and the findings were legal, as they claim, what are they so worried about?

Well, this:

A draft report of more than 200 pages, prepared in January before Bush's departure, recommends disciplinary action by state bar associations against two former department attorneys in the Office of Legal Counsel who might have committed misconduct in preparing and signing the so-called torture memos. State bar associations have the power to suspend a lawyer's license to practice or impose other penalties.

That seems like a pretty mild punishment for approving torture. Incidentally, the WaPo still can't call it torture, referring to waterboarding and walling as "techniques that critics have likened to torture." This isn't subjective. America has prosecuted waterboarding as a crime in the past. It's as though they had written, "Barack Obama, who some call the president" because the birthers, in the midst of re-enacting the Bad Boy/Death Row beef, are still demanding his birth certificate.