Multitask!

Amid the chaos of the political campaign and the alleged financial meltdown and Wall Street bailout (about which more later), never forget: the Bush administration condoned and promoted torture in contravention of U.S. and International Law and treaty obligations, not to mention all standards of morality and human decency.

In today's New York Times we read that high level Bush Administration officials—Condoleeza Rice, John Ashcroft, and Donald Rumsfeld—played "a central role" in meetings to determine whether so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" (i.e., Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Rove-speak euphemism for torture) should be used:

Senior White House officials played a central role in deliberations in the spring of 2002 about whether the Central Intelligence Agency could legally use harsh interrogation techniques while questioning an operative of Al Qaeda, Abu Zubaydah, according to newly released documents.

In meetings during that period, the officials debated specific interrogation methods that the C.I.A. had proposed to use on Qaeda operatives held at secret C.I.A. prisons overseas, the documents show. The meetings were led by Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser, and attended by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Attorney General John Ashcroft and other top administration officials.

The documents provide new details about the still-murky early months of the C.I.A.’s detention program, when the agency began using a set of harsh interrogation techniques weeks before the Justice Department issued a written legal opinion in August 2002 authorizing their use. Congressional investigators have long tried to determine exactly who authorized these techniques before the legal opinion was completed

There are documents. And these meetings took place before the CYA memos-to-file from John Yoo and the DOJ were produced to "justify" their crimes. Were VP* Cheney's and Pres.* Bush's fingerprints on any of them as well?

Who cares, right?

UPDATE: In answer to our rhetorical question above, Andrew Sullivan, for one. And he gets a heckuva lot more readers than WoW. Way to go, AS.