"Other reporting may explain why the report portrays Bush, rightly or wrongly, as so uninvolved in the torture program. Both Woodward and Mayer explain that the Sept. 17, 2001, MON was designed to outsource all the important decision-making to the CIA. "To give the President deniability, and to keep him from getting his hands dirty," Mayer writes in The Dark Side, "the [MON] called for the President to delegate blanket authority to Tenet to decide on"
"Whether or not Bush had knowledge of what was going on, the very program itself was set up to insulate him from the dirty work, giving him the ability to claim ignorance of a torture program everyone else knew about. (Later, Bush claimed that he was fully briefed.) But as we know, this insulation created the conditions for a program that was allowed to spin so horribly out of control that the CIA was able to misplace 29 detainees and not worry all that much."
The Memorandum of Notification delegated broad lethal, detention, and interrogation authority to the CIA, creating presidential deniability and insulating leaders from operational decisions. That delegation enabled the CIA to make case-by-case choices about killings, kidnappings, detentions, and interrogations without close external oversight. The insulation allowed programs to spin out of control, producing abuses such as torture, lost detainees, and poor accountability. The same MON framework authorized the CIA drone program, which expanded under the next administration and produced civilian casualties and apparent misinformation, reflecting parallel governance and oversight failures across covert operations.
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