White House Ordered Waterboarding by CIA

The Washington Post reports today that the Bush administration issued a pair of secret memos to the CIA in 2003 and 2004 that explicitly endorsed the agency's use of interrogation techniques such as waterboarding against al-Qaeda suspects -- documents prompted by worries among intelligence officials about a possible backlash if details of the program became public.

Does it take the CIA off the hook for carrying out torture?

The classified memos, which have not been previously disclosed, were requested by then-CIA Director George J. Tenet more than a year after the start of the secret interrogations, according to four administration and intelligence officials familiar with the documents. Although Justice Department lawyers, beginning in 2002, had signed off on the agency's interrogation methods, senior CIA officials were troubled that White House policymakers had never endorsed the program in writing.

Perhaps, but given the fact the CIA already knew that waterboarding wasn't an effective way to get valuable information - a water-boarded detainee will say literally anything to get the torture to stop - the point is moot. They should have pushed back, and said, 'listen, we know how to get information out of people, and it's by respecting their humanity.  We don't need to be in the torture game.  It is ineffective and demeans us a a country.'