The Senate Armed Services Committee Report, as I wrote yesterday, is chock full of evidence that standard legal doctrine, as well as contradictory legal opinions from military lawyers who are experts on international humanitarian law, was deliberately ignored or dismissed.

And the Office of Legal Counsel memos that sanctioned the brutal interrogation policies so blatantly twisted the relevant law, as even Republican legal scholars such as Jack Goldsmith have acknowledged, that they raise serious questions about whether the memos were written in the “good faith” required.  Sure, “the political officials would say they believed what they were doing was lawful,” as Professor Posner told the Times, but if the evidence shows that they instructed their lawyers to reach specific conclusions and to ignore law that dictated otherwise, then a jury may well not believe them.

And what to make of the recent revelation that the former aide to Condoleeza Rice, Philip Zelikow, submitted a memo to the State Department insisting that the abusive interrogation policies under consideration and approved by the OLC lawyers were clearly illegal?  The issue here isn’t that someone disagreed with their policies; it’s that, according to Zelikow: “The White House attempted to collect and destroy all copies of my memo.”

Can there be any better evidence of “bad faith” than seeking to destroy evidence of contradictory legal opinions?

President Obama may have all sorts of good reasons for not supporting a broad-ranging “truth commission” that inquires into the breadth of Bush administration policies in its war on terror, as he’s claiming now.  But he has said that he’s not opposed to a criminal investigation of the lawyers who approved those clearly illegal policies and how they reached their conclusions.

Given the wealth of evidence that’s come out that those conclusions were not reached objectively or in the “good faith” that’s required, that’s one investigation that’s clearly warranted.

FLEISCHER: There are some reporters, you know, in that briefing room, you can imagine, Bill, you get a lot of dot coms and other oddballs who come in there. They’re screened.

O’REILLY: Like the Huffington Post. Now it gets called on.

FLEISCHER: And I used to seat them all in one section. I would call it “Siberia.” And I told the president, “Don’t call on Siberia.”

You’d never know that Stein asked (and elevated) a question that the White House had been dodging, about whether it supported “truth and reconciliation” prosecutions of former Bush officials. You’d think Stein had asked about Alex Rodriguez or something. Nope: That was the Washington Post.

Gee, Wolf, what an amazing insight. However, I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve heard this somewhere before.

Oh yeah, now I remember! I made this very observation three weeks ago.

Thanks, Wolf. I’ll just assume that attribution is forthcoming.

Sen. Barack Obama’s day is more leisurely, with three events in Jacksonville, FL, Charlotte, NC, and Manassas, VA. His day ends around 10 p.m. CST.

Obama’s load is further lightened by the absence of a large press corps. As has been reported elsewhere, his campaign decided against adding another charter plane to the entourage to seat the dozens of journalists that typically — and understandably — hop on a campaign to report on its final days. Some have interpreted this refusal as a form of revenge on outlets that endorsed McCain; the campaign itself argues that a second plane would have slowed it down. The latter is arguable.

The second McCain plane — affectionately known as the “ass plane” — tends to be ahead of the primary plane, but any time you add another person to an entourage, no matter where he or she is traveling, you increase the possibility of delays.

We know that the Obama campaign’s decision not to add another charter wasn’t because it didn’t want to spend the money. While enormously expensive, charters are ultimately billed to news organizations.

I suspect Team Obama skipped the charter because, at this point, it doesn’t need the press to be there to write about them. Heck, at this point, it barely needs the press at all.

For all the talk of the Bush administration’s contempt for the media, and its attempts to work around the “filter” of the MSM, it’s the Obama campaign that’s all but perfected the smooth integration of the public into a message-distribution machine. From its incredible, promoting-from-without volunteer ground game to its cellphone-list-calling ventures, many of Obama’s most ambitious aides have used “earned media” (what political professionals call media you don’t pay for) as almost an afterthought.

Thus McCain’s second plane, as lucky as I feel to be on it (snarky video below notwithstanding), seems less like a luxury than another sign that the Republicans have been lapped, tactics-wise — if not according to mileage specifically.