Quote of note:

Paul C. Light, an authority on bureaucracy who is a political scientist at New York University, said Bush "should have been sharp enough to see the potential damage to the U.S. reputation, if not his own." But Light said that with Bush's approach to governing, an international group's concerns about detainees would have been viewed as "nothing but a rounding error" in the greater goal of fighting global terrorism.

"This administration has been blinded by its hubris," Light said. "The way this group of people operates is to have this kind of echo chamber in which they hear what they want to hear, see what they want to see. . . . They have no formal or informal method for challenging themselves, and that is a perfect recipe for this kind of result."

Management Style Shows Weaknesses
Delegation of Responsibility, Trust In Subordinates May Have Hurt Bush

By Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 2, 2004; Page A06

President Bush has long prided himself for focusing on big goals rather than on niggling details and delegating significant responsibility to his aides. But his belated attention to the brutality at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison has revealed vulnerabilities in a management style that had brought him personal and political success.

Bush's aides say the graphic images documenting the abuse of detainees took him by surprise. But as they tell it, the president and his staff received many clues over the past year that there might be a problem -- for example, periodic reports from the International Committee of the Red Cross -- and did nothing because they had been assured the Pentagon was on the case.

A variety of presidential advisers and scholars said the White House's failure to recognize the significance of the warnings points to flaws in Bush's approach to governing that also could have contributed to the administration's inadequate planning and inaccurate presentations in the run-up to the Iraq war.