Dishonor (Updated) 1

The New York Times stops just short of using the “T word,” preferring to call it “severe interrogations.” But let’s not beat around the bush: Alberto Gonzales’ Justice Department secretly approved torture — even as it told the rest of the world it didn’t, and as Congress was passing laws to ban torture

In a long investigative piece, the Times digs up two classified opinions issued by the department under Gonzales’ reign to prove it.

The first, issued soon after Gonzales’ arrival as attorney general in 2005, for the first time provided “explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including headslapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.”

(That “simulated drowning,” by the way, is the technique known as waterboarding: “pouring water over a bound prisoner’s cloth-covered face to induce fear of suffocation.”)

Meanwhile, the department’s official stand to the public was the one it issued in 2004, calling torture “abhorrent.”

Later in 2005, as Congress moved toward outlawing “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment, the Justice Department issued another secret opinion declaring that none of the C.I.A. interrogation methods violated that standard.

If they didn’t violate that standard, they at least produced some of the tainted results torture often yields: confessions to crimes the confessor probably didn’t commit.

When the C.I.A. caught Khaid Sheikh Mohammed, the chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, interrogators were “haunted by uncertainty.” They used a variety of “tough interrogation tactics” about 100 times over two weeks on the man known as K.S.M., and got all kinds of confessions. The problem is, intelligence officers say that “many of Mr. Mohammed’s statements proved exaggerated or false.”