White House dismissed advice... again

By GottaLaff

Guess what Zelikow's talking about:

"The administration pursued the policy course it wanted," said former State Department counselor Philip D. Zelikow [...] "It planned for the best instead of preparing for the worst, and decided that it would prefer to fight for what it wanted."

Iraq? Nope. Legal advice about detainees:

Senior lawyers inside and outside the Bush administration repeatedly warned the White House that it was risking judicial scrutiny of its detention policies in Guantanamo Bay if it did not pursue a more pragmatic legal strategy that considered the likely reaction of the Supreme Court. But such advice, issued periodically over the past six years, was ignored or discounted, according to current and former administration officials familiar with the debates. [...]

"Through misjudgment and overreaching, the White House ended up with the very result it sought to avoid -- heavy judicial involvement and erosion of deference to the president's view of wartime necessities," said Matthew Waxman, who worked on detainee affairs at the State Department and the Pentagon before leaving last fall to teach law at Columbia University.

Albert Einstein: Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.