ABC News:

…a handful of top advisers signed off on how the CIA would interrogate top al Qaeda suspects — whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called waterboarding.

The high-level discussions about these “enhanced interrogation techniques” were so detailed, these sources said, some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed — down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic.

The advisers were members of the National Security Council’s Principals Committee, a select group of senior officials who met frequently to advise President Bush on issues of national security policy.

At the time, the Principals Committee included Vice President Cheney, former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, as well as CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft.

I’m still trudging through John Yoo’s newly declassified memo that gave the greenlight to torture as a natural extension of Executive Privilege in 2003.

But the logic is laid out in all its evil circularity early on.

It goes like this:

The Fifth Amendment’s due process protections and Eighth Amendment’s prohibitions against cruelty do not apply a) to aliens abroad and b) are rendered meaningless by the president’s totalitarian powers during time of war.

And if the president is above the constitution, he’s certainly above the law. Among the federal criminal statues that Yoo says “would conflict with… Commander in Chief power”: “assault… maiming… interstate stalking… war crimes… and torture.”

If foreign detainees held on foreign soil have no protection from U.S. law, what about international law? Well, says Yoo, the Geneva Conventions do not require anything more of the United States than what is provided for in the Fifth and Eighth Amendments, which as we just learned do not apply to foreign detainees. Furthermore: “international law is not federal law and the President is free to override it at his discretion.” (!)

To recap: The president is unbound by international law — ever — and not constrained by either federal law or the Constitution in his role as commander in chief, which gives him carte blanche authority to have illegal enemy combatants who are detained on foreign soil assaulted, maimed, tortured, and otherwise subjected to war crimes, so long as the president deems it necessary or in “self-defense” of the nation.

I’m literally sick.

Waterboarding. But don’t worry. The agency doesn’t do that anymore. It was so 2002.

The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

I wish these were not the facts. But they are. We now have a direct witness to the torture – and one who inflicted it – describing it as torture; we have all the legal precedents that do not begin to question whether waterboarding is torture; we know the president directly authorized it; we know the epidemic of torture that ensued. These are crimes, committed by the executive branch in full awareness of the law and with premeditation. They place the United States in violation of the Geneva Conventions. And the president bears the final responsibility.

I hate to ask the inevitable question: Who will now hold him criminally responsible?

If the U.S. doesn’t torture, why does it keep destroying tapes documenting its interrogations?

Either that, or, “losing” them.

History will judge us harshly.

How real American interrogation works:

After confessing to slaughtering 180,000 Kurds and plotting to build a doomsday nuke, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was so upset when his FBI interrogator left for home that he cried like a baby.

FBI Special Agent George Piro whipped out two Cuban Cohibas – Saddam’s favorite cigar – and they smoked on the patio behind his cell at Baghdad’s airport.

“When we were saying bye, he started to tear up,” Piro recalled… The self-effacing G-man was hardly surprised – he had spent nearly a year carefully becoming Saddam’s best friend in a successful ploy to extract confessions from the notorious brute…

Piro, then 36, began grilling Saddam in early 2004. Instead of bright lights, loud music or waterboarding, the Beirut-born Arabic speaker – who immigrated to the U.S. as a teen – built a rapport with the dictator nabbed in a spider hole. He treated him with respect and took care of his every need.

On his birthday, Piro showed Saddam news clippings showing that Iraqis no longer celebrated the date. But then the agent gave him baklava Piro’s Lebanese mother sent him in Baghdad.

They talked about sports and Saddam’s pulp novels, and soon the despot was spilling his guts over thick cups of Folger’s.

Hat Tip: Andrew Sullivan

He had himself tortured. He spoke out against the technique. And then he was forced out.

Intensive questioning has to be used. Torture should not be used. The line between the two is a difficult one. –Rudy Giuliani

That line is not difficult. It’s the line between us. And them. Or at least it was until Bush and Cheney and Yoo and Addington and Gonzales came into the picture.

The only way to make sure that intensive questioning does not rise to the level of torture is to stop far, far short of torture.

Tragically, this administration decided to tip-toe up to the line. And then started to creep over it. With dogs. And stress positions. Leaping in whole hog with partial drownings, sleep deprivation, and hypothermia.

And at each step they tried to re-draw the line, to crookedly accommodate their latest transgressions. And now our government is practicing the techniques of Torquemada and Stalin and Pol Pot. And “intensive questioning” has led to blood-streaked prison cells, and dead or disappeared prisoners.

No Rudy. The line isn’t difficult. Not if you’re determined that this is the evil America will never again become: