Bush administration began preparing to conduct harsh interrogations long before they were granted legal approval

What all the investigations will ultimate lead to is Mid to High-level CAREER government personnel, Civilian and Military, Pentagon and Judicial, pitched all of these interogation techniques to the White House and pitched thier legality. The White House than approved it.

No where will they ever "Discover" that Bush and Chaney dreamed this whole thing up themselves while in some coma-induced religeous trance.

BKnudson ... "No where will they ever "Discover" that Bush and Chaney dreamed this whole thing up themselves while in some coma-induced religeous trance."

Although, I don't agree that it had anything to do with a religious trance, I can't argue with your overall take on this. :-)

Anyone surprised by this report, raise his/her hand.

The article says that the interrogation of Zubaida yielded no information that helped to stop any terrorist plots, yet they apparently kept waterboarding him over and over again anyway. Would any rational person believe that if you didn't get the information you wanted the first 79 times that you would somehow get it the 80th time? And KSM was waterboarded more than 180 times! Can somebody give any kind of rational explanation for any of this? It almost sounds like they kept torturing thse guys just for the fun of it, well after there was any hope of gaining any new (truthful) information. And now we're told that they started torturing Zubaida BEFORE they had any legal clearance to do so. If these aren't war crimes, what are they? This is not the United States that I thought I knew. It sounds more like Nazi Germany light. I'm just glad that the national nightmare is finally over with Bush and Cheney gone, but we will never be able to remove the stench from our international reputation.

It's a sad tale, a combination of unreasonable ignorance (I guess Bush was not kidding when he claimed to have learned nothing at Yale; and sadly, Republican lawmakers are not much better), reasonable suspicion of malice (Cheney -- I agree with metonitoo (#1.1) that surely he knew better, having served in the Ford administration) and a bunch of yes-man lawyers (Gonzales, Yoo) who acted like spinmasters and not members of the bar. I'd go a bit further than metonitoo and suggest that the lawyers in question be held responsible as well.

One could not help but wonder: of the prisoners still held at Guantanamo and Bagram, how many do we actually have actionable intelligence on, but cannot bring to court because the intelligence was obtained illegally; and how many are just held because nobody wanted to be responsible for freeing the next Osama?

Civil rights activists tend to favour the latter explanation, but now that Cheney's claim has been corroborated by the Intelligence Director [NYtimes via killfille], perhaps there is more of the former than we suspected. All the more reason to not have opened the Pandora's box of illegal interrogation in the first place!

them people would not think twice about blowing up 50 people we did what had to be done we are to soft thay want to blow us up we can not back down to terrorist thay need to know that fight fire with fire

shame on that bush administration.treating harshly those religious peacful people.if only those brave,and tortured souls.could have a women,or child take those harsh treatment.it is a small price to pay for being a coward.i am a compassionate marxust.i found very little good about daddy bush,or dubya.i have to say two thumbs up.

Again, the only question here is "Did the interrogation methods used by CIA officers save lives?" If the answer is yes then no problems. The methods used do not matter in the least.

One has to wonder if the cart was before the horse. Did the torture memos come into existence to justify and legitimize what was already being done? If so, is there anything to ever stop that from happening again?

What crappy lawyering. At the very least everyone of them should be dis-barred. At the maximum end of the scale...go to trial let the courts do what our constitution empowers them to do. A concept that is apparently foreign to Bush and his administration.

I can't believe in today's world that anyone would thing there would be any value to beating it out of someone. This may sound crass but what happened to good old bribery? Paying for information...doing the legwork to develop contacts etc?

What else should we expecxt from rookies? Since Vietnam the military and our government has been controlled by people with little life experience other then Univeristy and a superficial career. The only model of war they had in their minds was out of a Rambo movie. There was and still is among these folks the Good Guys (us) and them the Bad Guys (them). I am hoping members of congress have more of a mature mindset now then they did after 9/11. The world is not about them and us black and white it is a mizture of colors.

Sad day for the men and women involve in our security that their daily work to keep us safe is not appreciated.

If those peope have the brains of monkeys like the ones who ran this country for eight years it is the right of a citizen to question them.

_I_F_____T— H— E____— S— H— O— E___— F— I— T— S— !— !— !

And now it appears that the torture policy was in fact meant to force detainees to admit to the existence of a link between Saddam and al Qaeda; to find justification for the war when it became obvious that there were no WMD.

The President of the United States of America presided over the organization of a system of torture, NOT to gather urgent intelligence to prevent another 9/11, but to justify an illicit war...