From Scott Shane, David Johnston and James Risen at the NY Times:

WASHINGTON, Oct. 3 — When the Justice Department publicly declared torture “abhorrent” in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations.

But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.

Mr. Gonzales approved the legal memorandum on “combined effects” over the objections of James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general, who was leaving his job after bruising clashes with the White House. Disagreeing with what he viewed as the opinion’s overreaching legal reasoning, Mr. Comey told colleagues at the department that they would all be “ashamed” when the world eventually learned of it.

Later that year, as Congress moved toward outlawing “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment, the Justice Department issued another secret opinion, one most lawmakers did not know existed, current and former officials said. The Justice Department document declared that none of the C.I.A. interrogation methods violated that standard.

It appears the torture methods came from countries known for their brutal governments:

The Bush administration had entered uncharted legal territory beginning in 2002, holding prisoners outside the scrutiny of the International Red Cross and subjecting them to harrowing pressure tactics. They included slaps to the head; hours held naked in a frigid cell; days and nights without sleep while battered by thundering rock music; long periods manacled in stress positions; or the ultimate, waterboarding.

Never in history had the United States authorized such tactics. While President Bush and C.I.A. officials would later insist that the harsh measures produced crucial intelligence, many veteran interrogators, psychologists and other experts say that less coercive methods are equally or more effective.

With virtually no experience in interrogations, the C.I.A. had constructed its program in a few harried months by consulting Egyptian and Saudi intelligence officials and copying Soviet interrogation methods long used in training American servicemen to withstand capture.

What’s next? Chopping off hands? Beheadings? Forced labor camps? That’s a nice group of mentors, reviled internationally. In fact, Al Qaida’s second in command (al-Zawahiri) was permanently radicalized after being tortured in Egypt’s prisons.

The only intelligence that has been disclosed offering any ‘proof’ about the value of the torture is the information gained from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks:

Former intelligence officials, for the first time, disclosed that a variety of tough interrogation tactics were used about 100 times over two weeks on Mr. Mohammed. Agency officials then ordered a halt, fearing the combined assault might have amounted to illegal torture. A C.I.A. spokesman, George Little, declined to discuss the handling of Mr. Mohammed. Mr. Little said the program “has been conducted lawfully, with great care and close review” and “has helped our country disrupt terrorist plots and save innocent lives.”

“The agency has always sought a clear legal framework, conducting the program in strict accord with U.S. law, and protecting the officers who go face-to-face with ruthless terrorists,” Mr. Little added.

Some intelligence officers say that many of Mr. Mohammed’s statements proved exaggerated or false. One problem, a former senior agency official said, was that the C.I.A.’s initial interrogators were not experts on Mr. Mohammed’s background or Al Qaeda, and it took about a month to get such an expert to the secret prison. The former official said many C.I.A. professionals now believe patient, repeated questioning by well-informed experts is more effective than harsh physical pressure.

Other intelligence officers, including Mr. Kelbaugh, insist that the harsh treatment produced invaluable insights into Al Qaeda’s structure and plans.

“We leaned in pretty hard on K.S.M.,” Mr. Kelbaugh said, referring to Mr. Mohammed. “We were getting good information, and then they were told: ‘Slow it down. It may not be correct. Wait for some legal clarification.’”

The doubts at the C.I.A. proved prophetic. In late 2003, after Mr. Yoo left the Justice Department, the new head of the Office of Legal Counsel, Jack Goldsmith, began reviewing his work, which he found deeply flawed. Mr. Goldsmith infuriated White House officials, first by rejecting part of the National Security Agency’s surveillance program, prompting the threat of mass resignations by top Justice Department officials, including Mr. Ashcroft and Mr. Comey, and a showdown at the attorney general’s hospital bedside.

Then, in June 2004, Mr. Goldsmith formally withdrew the August 2002 Yoo memorandum on interrogation, which he found overreaching and poorly reasoned. Mr. Goldsmith, who left the Justice Department soon afterward, first spoke at length about his dissenting views to The New York Times last month, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday.

Despite trying to select officials they could count on to provide supporting opinions permitting torture, they occasionally found themselves blocked by principled legal analysis:

Under Mr. Ashcroft, Mr. Comey’s opposition might have killed the opinion. An imposing former prosecutor and self-described conservative who stands 6-foot-8, he was the rare administration official who was willing to confront Mr. Addington. At one testy 2004 White House meeting, when Mr. Comey stated that “no lawyer” would endorse Mr. Yoo’s justification for the N.S.A. program, Mr. Addington demurred, saying he was a lawyer and found it convincing. Mr. Comey shot back: “No good lawyer,” according to someone present.

But under Mr. Gonzales, and after the departure of Mr. Goldsmith and other allies, the deputy attorney general found himself isolated. His troublemaking on N.S.A. and on interrogation, and in appointing his friend Patrick J. Fitzgerald as special prosecutor in the C.I.A. leak case, which would lead to the perjury conviction of I. Lewis Libby, Mr. Cheney’s chief of staff, had irreparably offended the White House.

“On national security matters generally, there was a sense that Comey was a wimp and that Comey was disloyal,” said one Justice Department official who heard the White House talk, expressed with particular force by Mr. Addington.

Mr. Comey provided some hints of his thinking about interrogation and related issues in a speech that spring. Speaking at the N.S.A.’s Fort Meade campus on Law Day — a noteworthy setting for the man who had helped lead the dissent a year earlier that forced some changes in the N.S.A. program — Mr. Comey spoke of the “agonizing collisions” of the law and the desire to protect Americans.

“We are likely to hear the words: ‘If we don’t do this, people will die,’” Mr. Comey said. But he argued that government lawyers must uphold the principles of their great institutions.

“It takes far more than a sharp legal mind to say ‘no’ when it matters most,” he said. “It takes moral character. It takes an understanding that in the long run, intelligence under law is the only sustainable intelligence in this country.”

In 2005, they got what they wanted after appointing Steven Bradbury to head the Office of Legal Counsel, a guy who approved most of the torture practices. And many found that position dangerous and deeply flawed.

John D. Hutson, who served as the Navy’s top lawyer from 1997 to 2000, said he believed that the existence of legal opinions justifying abusive treatment is pernicious, potentially blurring the rules for Americans handling prisoners.

“I know from the military that if you tell someone they can do a little of this for the country’s good, some people will do a lot of it for the country’s better,” Mr. Hutson said. Like other military lawyers, he also fears that official American acceptance of such treatment could endanger Americans in the future.

“The problem is, once you’ve got a legal opinion that says such a technique is O.K., what happens when one of our people is captured and they do it to him? How do we protest then?” he asked.

This, in America, refutes centuries of precedence in our efforts to rise above the cruel practices of dictators. Not only for ethical reasons but for the practical, as it’s widely accepted that other interrogation methods produce better results. While claiming it’s about information gathering, the reality is that such torture only fulfills the needs of sadists who enjoy being cruel.

Our nation’s reputation has been broken, our troops are at greater risk. And all we got from the sordid deal is the knowledge that sadistic men got their jollies from it, at every American’s expense.

And elsewhere in the blogosphere:

In a different perspective, Tom Maguire points out that the War on Drugs has created a set of methodologies by drug smugglers that terrorists have copied and points to part of the revelations in the story as proof.

Emptywheel sees a confidential leak war going on with this latest story and wonders who the players are, and their motives.

Jeralyn Merritt points out that the crucial details are still thin and reminds us of old assertions made behind closed doors to the Senate Intelligence Committee that Bush has the right to order killings of terror suspects on US soil.

McJoan insists the important point going forward is to withhold confirmation of the new Attorney General until the details are laid out and he refutes the future use of the torture.

Digby says:

What a surprise. They’re still doing it.

When Bush said, “a dictatorship would be easier — as long as I’m the dictator” he wasn’t joking. They simply do not believe that they have to adhere to the rule of law — it’s awe-inspiring in its pathology. And the rest of us are like a bunch of frightened townspeople, hovering behind the curtains just hoping these drunken louts will pass out or leave town before they take a match to the place.

I am still stunned that we are talking about the United States of America issuing dry legal opinions about how much torture you are allowed to inflict on prisoners. Stories like this one are the very definition of the banality of evil — a bunch of ideologues and bureaucrats blithely committing morally reprehensible acts apparently without conscience or regret.

And she points out that every Democratic presidential candidate, except Hilary, and only Ron Paul, among the Republicans, have signed pledges against torture and other similar Constitutional violations.

I think law professor Marty Lederman provides the best summation of all:

Between this and Jane Mayer’s explosive article in August about the CIA black sites, I am increasingly confident that when the history of the Bush Administration is written, this systematic violation of statutory and treaty-based law concerning fundamental war crimes and other horrific offenses will be seen as the blackest mark in our nation’s recent history — not only because of what was done, but because the programs were routinely sanctioned, on an ongoing basis, by numerous esteemed professionals — lawyers, doctors, psychologists and government officers — without whose approval such a systematized torture regime could not be sustained.

Moreover, as I have argued many times in this space, there is no real justification for classifying the legal advice and the basic outlines of the CIA program (subject, of course, to protections for foreign sources who would be compromised).

What, then, will it take for Congress to have the courage finally to provide the thorough public accounting that is so desperately needed here — and, perhaps more importantly, to pass laws that expressly and specifically prohibit identified techniques amounting to cruel treatment and torture; that prohibit secret, incommunicado CIA facilities; and that provide real legislative oversight so that this never happens again?

Yes: who’ll make it stop and make America America again?
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