Here's the link to the WaPo article
The lead of the story:
The Bush administration issued a pair of secret memos to the CIA in 2003 and 2004 that explicitly endorsed the agency's use of interrogation techniques such as waterboarding against al-Qaeda suspects -- documents prompted by worries among intelligence officials about a possible backlash if details of the program became public.
Are these this administration's Pentagon Papers? Is this perhaps the smoking gun that finally brings the fragile White House of Cards down? We can hope.
We can no longer say we are a nation that has never explicitly endorsed torture, right from the White House itself.
In any event, I'm glad to finally post a non-Obama/McCain diary. I don't care about the electoral implications of this article, and if the comments devolve into that, we're getting off track. This is about torture, not a tortuous campaign.
This takes away one of the principle arguments of torture enablers: the White House (Bush) does not explicitly say agencies can do it, and the CIA should work in a clandestine manner. I hope this dispels some of that.
I'm glad the torture issue, something that used to be important around these parts before microtrends and swing states came to dominate the day, is coming back into the forefront.