the real story here is obvious — these DOJ memos authorizing torture were anything but the by-product of independent, good faith legal analysis. Instead, those memos — just like the pre-war CIA reports about The Threat of Saddam — were coerced by White House officials eager for bureaucratic cover for what they had already ordered. This was done precisely so that once this all became public, they could point to those memos and have the political and media establishment excuse what they did (“Oh, they only did what they DOJ told them was legal”‘/"Oh, they were only reacting to CIA warnings about Saddam’s weapons"). These DOJ memos, like the CIA reports, were all engineered by the White House to give cover to what they wanted to do; they were not the precipitating events that led to and justified those decisions. That is the critical point proven by the Comey emails, and it is completely obscured by the NYT article, which instead trumpets the opposite point

what is “stunning” was how extreme was the pressure from the White House to issue these memos and how compliant DOJ lawyers were to White House dictates. But that’s how our media works: anonymous government officials tell them what to say; they write it down uncritically; and it then becomes conventional wisdom regardless of how false it is.