Torturers in the White House.

• Position: Comment

Historians and archeologists sifting through the Bush Age will discover many horrors, but none so repulsive as the direct involvement of the most senior members of the Bush Administration in a calculated policy of torture.

First, the President and the Vice President showed their disdain for the laws and treaties against torture.

After 9/11, Bush said, "I don't care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass." Cheney notoriously added on Meet the Press that the United States would have to work "the dark side."

Bush illegally exempted Al Qaeda and the Taliban from the Geneva Conventions. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld followed up by issuing a memorandum on December 2, 2002, instructing interrogators on how to extract information by, among other things, "using detainees' individual phobias (such as fear of dogs) to induce stress."

The task of rationalizing the torture fell to the White House counsel's office under Alberto Gonzales and to the Justice Department. Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo was one of the most vigorous apologists.

His now declassified memo of March 14, 2003, represents a new nadir for sophistry.

In it, he dismissed the Geneva Conventions, the Convention Against Torture, the Fifth and Eighth Amendments, and the federal statutes against war crimes and torture.

He said the President is "flee to override" international law "at his discretion."

As for U.S. law, "Congress may no more regulate the President's ability to detain and interrogate enemy combatants than it may regulate his ability to direct troop movements on the battlefield," he wrote.

U.S. personnel could not be found guilty of torture, Yoo wrote, unless their actions led to "death, organ failure, or permanent damage," and unless that was their "precise objective."

Even then, they could get away with it by relying on "necessity or self-defense." But senior Bush officials didn't only set the policy. They also applied it.

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As ABC News has reported, the Principals Committee, including Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, John Ashcroft, George Tenet, Colin Powell, and Donald Rumsfeld, met to discuss which particular torture techniques should be used against Al Qaeda suspects in U.S. custody.

The group signed off on specific techniques, including sleep deprivation, slapping, pushing, and waterboarding, and gave instructions "so detailed ... some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed, down to the number...