Bush and the CIA Tradition of Torture:

"Read the manual for yourself. You can find it - and a Reagan-era update - online at the National Security Archive. Here you will see exactly why the Pentagon wanted young prison guards at Abu Ghraib to keep the Iraqis naked, sexually humiliate them, sic dogs on them, force them into stress positions, continually break up their eating and sleeping routines, deprive them of sensory stimulation, and apply several other clear-cut violations of the Geneva Conventions.

As the 1963 manual makes clear, the Pentagon's goal in 2003 was not to produce unbearable pain. Instead, the Pentagon wanted to exploit their captives' internal conflicts, make them wrestle in themselves, force them to regress toward childhood, make them feel dread and guilt, and render them unable to hold back information interrogators wanted.

Whether in Afghanistan, Guant?namo, Iraq, or its global gulag of secret torture centers, Team Bush did not conjure all this up as they rushed to war in Afghanistan and Iraq. Stress and duress, and the people trained to use it, have been in the American arsenal for years. They were there ready for the administration to use. Bush lawyers did not even have to think up the argument that stress and duress was something less than torture. The canard has been around as long as the techniques themselves.

Where Bush and his advisers showed their originality was in characteristically going too far. The KUBARK manual warned field interrogators never to use the techniques without explicit approval of higher-ups, who would weigh the need for intelligence against the risk that outsiders might learn that Americans were using torture.

Later versions carried warning labels: "The use of force, mental torture, threats, insults or exposure to inhumane treatment of any kind as an aid to interrogation is prohibited by law, both international and domestic; it is neither authorized nor condoned."

"While we deplore the use of coercive techniques, we do want to make you aware of them so that you may avoid them."

Beyond the obvious CYA, the Pentagon and CIA both tried to maintain plausible denial, having senior officials decide when to apply which methods, or letting foreign nationals do most of the dirty work. Mr. Bush ignored such restraints, making wholesale, even boastful use of coercive techniques that his predecessors had tried to use on the sly."