For starters, Bush insisted that torture was legal. He bought into the official legal reviews on it, hook, line, and sinker. If his administration’s legal counsels said that no international or domestic law can bind him to legal culpability in times of war, then the advice must have been sound. Everybody dealing with the top terror-suspect Abu Zubaydah believed that he ‘wouldn’t talk except by using torture.’

For Bush (upon the advice of the people in his presidential circle), the use of torture was ‘designed to be safe,’ as well as compliant with US laws, US Constitution, and US treaty obligations. After all, even the US Department of Justice had reviewed ‘the authorized methods extensively, and determined them to be lawful.’ On Feb. 7, 2002, he even declared that the Geneva Conventions will not be applicable to the move.

The biggest glitch, of course, was that Bush failed to tell Congress that he had already allowed the use of torture. That was one legal requirement he missed. Congress got wind of it only after Abu Zubaydah had already been waterboarded.

But the biggest tragedy of Bush in this torture ruckus was that he was the President of the United States of America. Besides being ultimately accountable, he was also fundamentally superior. Everyone else in the administration was simply a subordinate to him. The Bush circle insists that ‘if he authorized it, it couldn’t be torture.’ As Condoleezza Rice said: “By definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations in the Convention Against Torture.”

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Via salon.com