Scott Horton has a post on the state of the tor­ture debate at his Harper’s blog. Horton argues that we now have actual evi­dence that the CIA was able to invoke the per­sonal author­ity of George W. Bush to sanc­tion its use of torture:

This week, a CIA agent, John Kiri­akou, appeared, first on ABC News and then in an inter­view with NBC’s Matt Lauer, and explained just how the system works. When we want to tor­ture some­one (and it is tor­ture he said, no one involved with these tech­niques would ever think any­thing dif­fer­ent), we have to write it up. The team leader of the tor­ture team pro­poses what tor­ture tech­niques will be used and when. He sends it to the Deputy Chief of Oper­a­tions at the CIA. And there it is reviewed by the hier­ar­chy of the Com­pany. Then the pro­posal is passed to the Jus­tice Depart­ment to be reviewed, blessed, and it is passed to the National Secu­rity Coun­cil in the White House, to be reviewed and approved. The NSC is chaired, of course, by George W. Bush, whose per­sonal author­ity is invoked for each and every instance of tor­ture autho­rized. And, accord­ing to Kiri­akou as well as others, Bush’s answer is never “no.” He has never found a case where he didn’t find tor­ture was appropriate.

Horton goes on to spec­u­late about how Attor­ney Gen­eral Michael Mukasey fits in to the picture:

As I noted pre­vi­ously, there is a strong basis to fear that Mukasey came up through a litmus test under which he was required to do two things: (1) to give his com­mit­ment to con­tinue to pro­vide cover for the tor­ture system, and (2) to block any effort to have a mean­ing­ful crim­i­nal inves­ti­ga­tion that would dis­close the tor­ture system or any of its details. As things now stand, it looks like Mukasey is deliv­er­ing on these test points.

Here are some excerpts from the tran­script of the Kiri­akou interview:

LAUER: Where was the per­mis­sion [for "enhanced inter­ro­ga­tion tech­niques"] given in your opin­ion? The high­est levels of the CIA? Was the White House involved in that decision?

Mr. KIRI­AKOU: Absolutely. This isn’t some­thing that’s done willy-​nilly. It’s not some­thing that an agency offi­cer just wakes up in the morn­ing and decides he’s going to carry out an enhanced tech­nique on a pris­oner. This was a policy deci­sion that was made at the White House with con­cur­rence from the National Secu­rity Coun­cil and the Jus­tice Department.

LAUER: Was it blan­ket per­mis­sion for this par­tic­u­lar pris­oner? In other words, use it no matter what, or did there have to be per­mis­sion before each interrogation?

Mr. KIRI­AKOU: Before each inter­ro­ga­tion, but more than that, before each tech­nique was used. For exam­ple, if you want to water­board some­one, you have to come in with a cable, with a well-laid-out, well-thought-out reason for want­ing to do some­thing like this.

LAUER: All right, so water­board­ing, the guy’s laid on his back, a cloth over his face, water is poured on that cloth. It sim­u­lates the feel­ing of drown­ing? Fair description?

Mr. KIRI­AKOU: It does.

LAUER: In your opin­ion, tor­ture or not torture?

Mr. KIRI­AKOU: I think, yes, tor­ture. I’m not saying that it wasn’t nec­es­sary at the time, and I’ll let the lawyers decide if it’s legal or not, but at the time I think it was nec­es­sary to dis­rupt ter­ror­ist attacks.

LAUER: But it was tor­ture in your opinion?

Mr. KIRI­AKOU: I believe it was.

…

LAUER: Finally, do you see any reason–can you think of any reason why the CIA would have destroyed the tapes of those inter­ro­ga­tions other than to destroy valu­able and incrim­i­nat­ing evi­dence in a pos­si­ble tor­ture investigation?

Mr. KIRI­AKOU: I want to believe that some­body just wasn’t think­ing and they went ahead and did it with­out thought for…

LAUER: You’ve had 14 years in the CIA.

Mr. KIRI­AKOU: I know. I know.

LAUER: That’s some­what naive.

Mr. KIRI­AKOU: It is, it is. And I want to think the best, but I think it was just a ter­ri­ble mis­take, at the very least for the his­tor­i­cal record.

LAUER: And it destroyed evidence.

Mr. KIRI­AKOU: I think it did.