I just finished Jane Mayer's The Dark Side. The sub title of the book is polemic, but basically it is a recent journalistic history of the internal legal battles within the White House and Pentagon over what was legally permissible during interrogation. The issue for the United States was that it had always abided by the Geneva Conventions, and the military had procedures and mechanisms to divide civilians out from soldiers, saboteurs and terrorists. This was blown away by Cheney's and Bush's 'get tough on terror' policies that enabled torture.

The legal mechanism for destroying all executive legal precedent for the Geneva Conventions was David Addingtons doctrinaire and political approach to the formerly independent OLC. The Office of Legal Counsel. It is a small legal department in the Executive which acts like a mini-supreme court in the Executive an writes memos and guidance on what is constitutionally and legally permissible for the Executive to do.

Like all the White House and Executive under the Bush Administration this independent office was politicized. John Yoo being the main perpetrator of giving Addington and Cheney exactly what they wanted in terms of legal advice. To make it worse, these legal memos were then made secret, so that the CIA and military had no real legal guidance over what they could do. Instead they were given legal advice such as 'take the gloves off' from the likes of Rumsfield, Tenet and Cheney.

To the FBI's credit under Mueller, they refused to torture. But the CIA appeared to be willing to do it and take it to abnormal lengths. Renditions were popular - they did exist during the Clinton Administration too - and suspects, real and imaginary, were sent to hellholes in Syria, Poland, Afghanistan and tortured.

The policy did not change despite the Supreme Court ruling against the legal policies of the Bush Administration. More independent lawyers such as Comey and Goldsmith fought against the secret and legal memos, but in each case where Cheney and Addington came up against people acting in conscience they replaced the person - usually when they resigned - with someone politically pliable. Gonzalez and Bradbury.

The Bush Administration proved it was not particularly good at governance in multiple areas, the war on terror was no exception. The Bush Administration at its highest levels, including the President, Vice President, Secretary of Defense, the head of the CIA, the Attorney General, etc all embraced the policies that the United States will torture suspects for information and will not have habeas corpus available to them. The latter a simple political right from the 13thC, the former supposedly banned from civil and moral society.

It is sad the United States willingly and openly stooped so low. Worse, it did it all for nothing. Torture did not work, there was no good information from it, and it made many people who should have been publicly prosecuted in a court of law for their crimes against humanity impossible to take before a court because they had been tortured. It was a catastrophic failure of judgment, morality and governance by the Bush Administration.