While it had been widely assumed that the decision to torture enemy combatants and other detainees in the War on Terror began at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and the Bush administration long hid behind that “trickle up” explanation, it is now apparent that the origins of this dark chapter in American history — and the single most defining and insidious aspect of the Age of Bush — can be traced to Vice President Cheney.

Nevertheless, there has not been a satisfactory answer to the question of why in the wake of the 9/11 attacks the vice president and his cronies did not want to work within existing laws and systems with Congress and the courts, stubbornly objected to the creation of the 9/11 Commission and created an American gulag and rump court system that ignored constitutionally mandated niceties like habeas corpus.

Now comes Jane Mayer, a New Yorker staff writer, who answers that question in a hugely important new book being published today — The Dark Side: The Inside Story on How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals.

Like the Watergate scandal of four decades earlier, the answer is that it was all about covering up, in this instance Cheney spearheading a not vast right-wing conspiracy that was predicated on scaring the crap out of Americans, hence the oft repeated mantra that “everything has changed” because of 9/11, and the use of that rationale for a descent into morally repugnant methods and actions unprecedented in modern American history.

The purpose was to cover up the administration’s failure to act on repeated warnings that Al Qaeda planned a major attack on the homeland, an attack that it now appears could have been prevented had the White House not been so caught up in its own arrogant sense of infallibility. (In Cheney’s case, this hubris is all the more amazing because he was obsessed with doomsday scenarios and had participated in many drills in previous years that simulated attacks that might destabilize the government.)

This descent included extracting false confessions through torture that became an underpinning of the bogus Al Qaeda-Saddam Hussein connection and WMD threat that led directly to a war now in its sixth year, and even to satisfy grievances that Mayer says the vice president had been harboring for decades.

Please click here to read more at Kiko’s House, here for a new revelation concerning former Attorney General John Ashcroft, and here for an index with links to previous Bush torture regime-related posts.

First, if you’re wondering what I as a Hillary supporter think about Hillary’s decision to continue running after yesterday, the answer is I don’t know what I think of it as a strategy.  Naturally I would like to believe that she could still somehow prevail.  I am not sanguine.  People are speculating that she is now running for the VP slot.  We’ll see. 

But — and this matters more to me — I most definitely admire her for her unswerving commitment to see the process through.  Despite the pissing and moaning in the media, and whatever the outcome, I predict that the day will certainly arrive when people will look back with awe and amazement at  Hillary’s insistence in going the distance against all odds and wish that they had chosen her.  She is indomitable.  I like that in a Democrat and so should other Democrats.  Alas, many of them are so beguiled by the media myths about Hillary that they just can’t see what a force of nature she really is.  

Obama could learn a lot from her and he’d be a better (future) president for it.  Instead, I imagine we’ll be stuck with him in his current incarnation — all rhetoric, all the time.   

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With the drip drip of revelations that the decision to torture enemy combatants and other detainees in the so-called War on Terror began not with commanders and interrogators at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq but at the highest levels of the Bush administration, arguments that these insiders should and could be tried as war criminals have become more credible.

Just not tried in the U.S., of course.

As if we needed to be reminded that the White House has worked as hard to prevent these insiders from facing the consequences of their dirty deeds as they worked to rationalize the use of Nazi-like torture techniques, there is a provision in the Military Commissions Act of 2006 that would immunize them against prosecution.

But only in the U.S., of course.

Overseas is another matter, and any Geneva Conventions signatory nation has the right — indeed, the responsibility — to detain someone suspected or accused of violating Article 3 of the conventions.

Indeed, courts in Italy and Germany have issued warrants demanding the arrest of CIA operatives for kidnapping and torturing citizens and residents of their nations, although the warrants have not been executed for diplomatic reasons.

And an effort to prosecute former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld in France for the torture of detainees at Guantánamo Bay, the flagship accommodation in the Rumsfeld Gulag, has foundered because no court was willing to take on this hot potato.

But with every new revelation comes a flurry of articles suggesting that Bush administration big shots, present and former, might want to think twice before jetting off to Europe this summer for some sightseeing.

Please click here to read more at Kiko’s House, and here for an index of torture-related stories and links.

It is now well known that when the White House needed justification for its endorsement of Nazi-like torture techniques, it turned to John Yoo.

The young attorney in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel wrote a series of memos that he believed gave the Bush administration the legal fig leaf it needed to use torture and deny enemy combatants protection under the Geneva Conventions.

Yoo was a foot soldier in a national tragedy starring Vice President Cheney, Attorney General John Ashcroft and his successor, Alberto Gonzalez, Secretary of State Colin Powell and his successor, Condoleeza Rice, and CIA Director George Tenet. And, of course, The Decider himself.

The administration’s embrace of torture is the most atrocious aspect of a presidency that has determinedly turned the separation of powers, due process and the Rule of Law on its collective ear.

All in service of the specious claim that the president should have unlimited powers in the post-9/11 world even if it means defecating on the very constitutionally enshrined rights that we are fighting the so-called Global War on Terror to protect.

Public reaction to this dark interlude has been underwhelming.

This is because news coverage has sucked — and can you imagine it being any other way considering the spectacle of last night’s presidential “debate”? I also suspect that many people are okay with torture so long as it isn’t their son or daughter who is being waterboarded.

Meanwhile, there has been loud flailing by those who want to punish Yoo now.

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See, it’s not all about John Yoo. The U.S. didn’t just start torturing its detainees because a government lawyer said it was okay, or because some executive-branch extremist like David Addington determined that anything and everything was permissible in a time of war, or because some dim-witted troops at Abu Ghraib just didn’t know any better. At some point, early on, a decision to allow torture, to enable it, must have been made — and it must have been made at the highest levels of government. To put it another way, the decision to turn America into a nation that tortures must have been made at the top. The so-called “principals” must have signed off on it and Bush himself must have signed off on it.

And, it seems, they did just that. Here’s ABC News:

In dozens of top-secret talks and meetings in the White House, the most senior Bush administration officials discussed and approved specific details of how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency, sources tell ABC News.

The so-called Principals who participated in the meetings also approved the use of “combined” interrogation techniques — using different techniques during interrogations, instead of using one method at a time — on terrorist suspects who proved difficult to break, sources said.

*****

The advisers were members of the National Security Council’s Principals Committee, a select group of senior officials who met frequently to advise President Bush on issues of national security policy.

At the time, the Principals Committee included Vice President Cheney, former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, as well as CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft.

As the national security adviser, Rice chaired the meetings, which took place in the White House Situation Room and were typically attended by most of the principals or their deputies.

That’s right — not underlings like Yoo, not lawyers and academics, not bureaucrats and soldiers, but the very top officials in the U.S. government: Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Powell, Tenet, and Ashcroft. They signed off on it. They were the enablers of torture. They were the ones who turned America into a nation that tortures.

And they must be held accountable.

(Reality check: They won’t be. First, there’s the national security barrier — the details won’t get out. Second, Congress isn’t about to do anything — consider the do-nothingness of the post-2006 Democratic Congress. Third, while a Justice Department staffed with Obama or Clinton appointees could launch an aggressive investigation, it is unlikely that such a seemingly partisan political investigation, however legitimate in reality, would get very far.)