Over strident objection from entrenched interests, the administrtion has relased the latest four lengthy memos contrived by the previous regime’s torture (attempted) justification squad.

.pdf file formats of all four accessible here.

Page after page after page of convoluted (dare one say tortured) acquiescence to sadism, thuggery, flouting accepted law and parsing the vomit of tyranny.

Were these ‘techniques’ indisputably inflicted on a dog or other animal, the perpetrator along with any who gave the green light would rightfully be charged, convicted and punished.

Update April 17 12:30 p.m.: Indeed.

The four legal memos released by the Obama administration on Thursday confirm in excruciating detail that the Bush administration employed twisted and macabre legal reasoning to authorize the unspeakable – the torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of human beings.

[snip]

A child would recognize these tactics as cruel and inhumane. The United States itself treated waterboarding as torture when the Japanese used it against our troops in World War II. Yet through pages and pages of dense legal reasoning, the Office of Legal Counsel lawyers somehow reach the conclusion that these tactics, even when employed in combination and over a 30-day period, are not torture, and not even cruel, inhuman, or degrading. Source

Comparing the sterile, soulless theories of institutionally sanctioned terrorism with the realities of application:

One memo, written in August 2002 and signed by then OLC Chief Jay Bybee, approves a list of 10 “enhanced interrogation” techniques that the CIA wanted to use against Abu Zubayda, who was believed to be a senior member of al-Qaeda. The techniques are described in a detached, clinical manner: “walling,” the act of throwing detainees against a “flexible wall,” and “close confinement,” the act of placing a detainee within a confinement box that forces the detainee to stand or sit. The memo also approves the use of insects with the confinement box to enhance detainees’ sense of terror.

[snip]

Alex Abdo, a legal fellow with the ACLU’s National Security Project, says comparing the clinical description in the OLC memos to the ICRC report was surreal. “The four memos were written by lawyers trying to construct a legal regime that allowed the unthinkable. The sterilized language they use in the memos as compared with the graphic descriptions of the ICRC report make that patently clear,” Abdo says. “It’s as though you’re in Alice in Wonderland.” Source

One shudders to contemplate what other segments of a panic-driven curriculum which would make Torquemada blanch ( for example) still remain shielded by claims of secrecy.