Moral Low Ground 0
From Phillipe Sands in The Guardian:
On the basis of these conversations I believe that the administration has spun a false narrative. It claims that the impetus for the new interrogation techniques came from the bottom-up. That is not true: the abuse was a result of pressures driven from the highest levels of government. It claims the so-called Torture Memo of August 1, 2002 had no connection with policies adopted by the administration: that too is false, as the memo provided cover for Mr Haynes. It claims that in its actions it simply followed the law. To the contrary, the administration consciously sought legal advice to set aside international constraints on detainee interrogations, without apparently turning its mind to the consequences of its actions. In this regard, the position adopted by the Pentagon’s head of policy at the time, [Douglas] Feith, appears most striking.
As result, Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions was violated, along with provisions of the 1984 Convention prohibiting torture. The spectre of war crimes was raised by US Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, in the 2006 judgment in Hamdan v Rumsfeld. That judgment corrected the illegality of President Bush’s determination that none of the detainees at Guantanamo had any rights under Geneva.
Torture was their pornography.