Don’t expect the Baker Group to produce miracles on Iraq

Certainly not when one of its leading members still advocates the use of torture

That person would be Ed Meese, former Reagan White House Chief of Staff, then Attorney General.

In an interview in GQ, summarized in the blog Talking Points Memo, he’s even OK with summary field executions.

Elsewhere, TPM reports that in official military training already back in the 1980s, our troops were being informed that waterboarding, among the more nefarious practices condoned by George W. Bush, was considered torture, in no small part because the North Vietnamese had done it.

Meese is a member of the Baker/Hamilton Iraq Study Group, which is supposed to be finding a way to do something there besides “stay the course.” And as a former AG, he theoretically knows international law better than that, but actually doesn’t know it any better than the Revolutionary War-military history he spins.