Since the Abu Ghraib story broke in late April, the organization’s work — primarily taking firsthand testimonials from Iraqis, many of them quite disturbing if difficult to verify — has been cited in major media including the New York Times and the New Yorker magazine.

Fifteen years ago Kindy, a devout Methodist, helped found Christian Peacemaker Teams, whose motto is “Getting in the way.” His first mission as a human rights observer was to refugee camps in the Gaza Strip in 1994.

In the fall of 2002, Kindy and some of his fellow activists went to Baghdad in the hope that a presence of American pacifists might help halt the march to war. After President Bush declared an end to major combat operations in May 2003, CPT activists in Iraq shifted their focus from trying to stop the war to documenting life under the American-led occupation. Kindy says they’ve since collected over 200 accounts alleging abuses by the U.S. military, which they hope will garner media attention, fuel a letter-writing campaign by sympathetic church groups and help in lobbying U.S. policymakers.

But convincing occupation officials to soften their military tactics and detention procedures has been an uphill battle, particularly in the face of mounting American casualties. U.S. Army Lt. Col. Nate Sassaman, with whom Kindy had several personal encounters, spoke frequently about his efforts to win “hearts and minds” through simple acts like helping bake bread in a villager’s home. Sassaman was a battalion commander who oversaw operations around Abu Hishma village among other areas in the notorious Sunni Triangle. As pockets of Iraqi resistance began to flare up late last year, Sassaman’s relations with Iraqis became markedly different. He became infamous last November for enclosing the entire village of Abu Hishma in razor wire after an attack on one of his convoys occurred nearby. “If our base gets attacked,” Kindy remembers him saying, “we open up in every direction.”

Despite having heard numerous harrowing stories from released Iraqi prisoners, Kindy was still caught by surprise by the brutality exposed at Abu Ghraib. “Detainees were saying that the worst times were in the intake stages. The assumption was that when they were in temporary facilities or U.S. military bases scattered across Iraq they were more likely to be tortured,” he says. “We thought that once they got to the permanent facilities, like Buca camp down in the south or in Abu Ghraib prison, that things improved because there was a routine in place.”

Kindy returned to the United States in March from his second five-month mission in Iraq with Christian Peacemaker Teams. He spoke with Salon by phone from his farm in Indiana on Wednesday.

Once the war started, the role of Christian Peacemakers changed. How did your organization get into interviewing Iraqi detainees?

Right after the war, we were trying to find our way. It was in that period we were looking at unexploded ordnance, the danger of that for children and communities. We were also a presence with some of the nonviolent demonstrations.

But then this whole detainee issue started to open up. Neighbors and acquaintances started to come to us and say, “We don’t know whether our detainee is alive, what the charges are, where they’re being held. Can you help us?” Because we spoke English like the soldiers, sometimes we could facilitate answers. That developed through the fall, and we began hearing more and more stories. That led to a report that we wrote toward the end of December last year that carries some of the details of our findings working with about 70 detainee cases. And that continued as we worked our way up the civilian and military ladders of the occupation [with our findings] at the request of a couple of U.S. army officers.

U.S. Army officers asked you to inform their superior officers that abuses were taking place?

We shared our report with a staff sergeant at the Iraq Assistance Center. He passed it on to a couple of other people — a Maj. Simmie Clincy and a Col. Fisher — and they came to one of the meetings. At that meeting, on Dec. 22 last year, they said they didn’t agree with everything, but they acknowledged to us, “We’re giving orders out in the field to our soldiers that are putting them at long-term risk in order to have short-term security. We need to have policies developed to change that.”

So the Army officers had told you that they were receiving orders on how to deal with Iraqis that they considered improper or inhumane?

Right. But they said that in the chain of command they couldn’t reach the people who make the policies. They set out the steps we’d have to take to work our way up to the top in the U.S. occupation authority. Eventually we met with Ambassador Richard Jones in Civilian Administrator Paul Bremer’s office. Jones, who was former ambassador to Kuwait and Lebanon, had been brought in in early December to fix the problems with the detainees. We also met in Gen. Ricardo Sanchez’s office with Col. Mark Warren, the highest-ranking legal officer for the U.S. military in Iraq.

Col. Mark Warren has been in the news recently denying that torture was part of the military’s interrogation policy. What went on in your meeting with him?

It was Feb. 14, a Saturday. Warren had been in Baghdad since April 2003. I remember him saying, “We try to comply with the laws of war and human rights law,” and that “we try to have our soldiers be culturally aware. We’re putting out a new [order] to be precise about how much force needs to be used, and to be restrained in that.” Warren also said there would “be dramatic improvements in the next few weeks.”

He also mentioned the movie “The Battle of Algiers.” He said, “[Brutal tactics] worked in the short term, but they blew up in the face of the French. If they had worked, Algeria would be French now.” He said that was something “we need to learn from.”

He seemed to be trying to say that the U.S. wouldn’t use these kind of extreme interrogation tactics — that they wouldn’t work. The Abu Ghraib story hadn’t blown at that point. “We’re bringing a new group of MP’s to Abu Ghraib,” Warren said, “that are oriented to do family visits.” I don’t know if they’re the ones who also did the interrogations.

You also had some personal interactions with Lt. Col. Sassaman, who, according to the Washington Post on April 5, was “disciplined for impeding [a] probe” into an incident where American soldiers allegedly forced two Iraqis to jump off of a bridge. What was it like working with him?

Sassaman is an interesting character. He was the one, because of an attack on one of his convoys near Abu Hishma village [in November of 2003], who encircled the village with five miles of razor wire and instituted a nightly curfew. We also heard reports where, in raids on Abu Hishma, Sassaman’s unit took relatives hostage in order to get other people.

It was collective punishment. Even if people from the village did attack that convoy — and that wasn’t clear — you can’t justify punishing the thousands of people that lived in that village for the actions of a few people.

I think part of his response was out of his frustration at having soldiers injured or killed. It was also at those times that we’d hear about some of the more serious allegations going on under his command. He said that when they’re not clear where an attack comes from, they just let loose with everything. I remember him saying, “If our base gets attacked, we open up in every direction.”

What was CPT’s reaction when the images from Abu Ghraib started appearing in the media in late April?

Well, it kind of blew us away — not because we hadn’t been aware things like that were occurring, but because from the testimonies we had taken, detainees were saying that the worst times were in the intake stages. The assumption was that when they were in temporary facilities or U.S. military bases scattered across Iraq they were more likely to be tortured, they were more likely not to be protected from the weather, that they were more likely not to have sufficient water or food. We thought that once they got to the permanent facilites, like Buca camp down in the south or in Abu Ghraib prison, that things improved because there was a routine in place. When this story broke, we realized it was much bigger.

We’d been hearing some stuff from Abu Ghraib, but it wasn’t as significant as those early intake stages. We’d heard reports from Abu Ghraib village outside of the prison, saying that the women inside were asking that the prison be bombed, destroyed, because what was happening inside was too terrible to live with. We were hearing some reports of torture inside the prison, fingernails, thumbnails being pulled off, but not the kinds of [sexual] abuses we’ve heard about in the last few weeks.

CPT is one of the few human rights organizations that publishes first-person testimonials. Why do you use that approach?

A lot of that is for our constituency, so they can write and bring pressure to bear on government officials. It’s a way to make the story more personal for them; it grabs their interest more quickly; that’s one of the reasons we use it. Also, we’re hoping that emphasizes less of our own perspective in the story.

But doesn’t that make you less of an objective fact-finder than someone who’s there to air Iraqi grievances?

What we say when we take testimony is not that we have necessarily verified the accuracy of it. What we are saying is, “This is what a detainee or a family came and told us about their situation and experience.”

We aren’t lawyers. We don’t pretend to have a fully balanced story. But we have had experiences in lots of different communities that seemed to be consistent.

And we don’t put everything we hear in our longer reports. We try to be critical about what we put in; if we weren’t sure about a story, we’d leave it out. If it sounded like exaggeration and we weren’t getting any confirmation of it from other places, we’d usually let it go.

At one point we were led to understand that probably the Sunni Triangle would be worse, because that was where resistance was happening. Well, we got outside the Sunni Triangle frequently and the stories were coming down in Kerbala and Najaf, as well, and up in Dialah. It seemed clear that the abuses weren’t just a “geographical problem” with the occupation.

It’s not that there’s a handful of people upset with the occupation. Most Iraqis are upset with the occupation. They don’t need anybody to tell them what’s wrong with the occupation because they can see it, they’ve experienced it, their family members have experienced it.

Several testimonials published by CPT contain some extreme allegations. Do you think that some of the stories you heard were embellished?

There were a few of those kinds of stories, yes. But for the most part, I think the stories included in our cumulative report follow a familiar pattern. Humiliation, lack of cultural sensitivity on the part of U.S. soldiers, lack of accountability. Soldiers were not held accountable for actions.

Do you think other human rights organizations working in Iraq have been more conservative in reporting suspected instances of abuse?

Maybe in the sense that they don’t have a very clear picture of what’s happening across Iraq. I’d expect that a group like Care, or the American Friends Service Committee would be more cautions about what they said about this issue because they haven’t been so much involved in it. The kind of experiences we’ve had, the things we’ve seen and taken testimony about, give us a little more of a base to speak with boldness and credibility.

Did you ever personally witness abuse of Iraqis while you were there?

We weren’t present when serious abuse was happening against Iraqis. I’d see people being humiliated at a checkpoint, that kind of stuff. But nothing like dogs or electrical prods used on them. Most of the time, I think “the grandma factor” is at work: People don’t like others to see them doing bad things. It’s one of the strengths of the Christian Peacemaker Team presence.

How did the American media respond to the CPT’s reports of abuse before the Abu Ghraib story broke?

We were always trying to get U.S. press. It was like we were invisible. We decided we needed to make a concerted effort to build relationships with these press people. So we started visiting them, and we talked about Abu Siffa [a village on the Tigris where CPT had extensively documented the use of harsh tactics by U.S. forces]. And Jeff Gettleman, a reporter for the New York Times, called us at one point, so two of our group went up to Abu Siffa with him. They talked with Lt. Col. Nate Sassaman, the commanding officer for troops in the area, and talked with people in the village, and wrote the story for the front page of the New York Times. I think it was a miracle that we got that to happen.

Can you describe the relationship between CPT and the U.S. military?

Our meetings with higher officials and officers are fairly congenial. We usually start with trust, we assume that people we meet are going to be friends, and I think in general that’s what we’ve found in those meetings.

But it’s mixed. I’d pass out our human-rights leaflet to a couple of soldiers on the street, and one guy’s ready to ball it up and throw it back in my face, while another one says, “Oh, give me some more information, do you have any Web sites on this, do you have a G.I. rights hotline I can get in touch with?”

In general I think that U.S. soldiers are happy to meet somebody who speaks English — reminds them of home, someone who’s willing to listen to them.

Religious faith is a prominent aspect of CPT’s outlook. How does that affect your work?

Every time I go into a conflict zone I am emotionally impacted by the experience, sometimes traumatized, and if this work is going to be sustainable, we need to find the tools that enable us to return somewhat healed. It helps me focus, see the bigger picture and issues like forgiveness, justice, love, nonviolence. Those for me come out of my Christian perspective, although they’re not unique to a Christian perspective. We’ve worked very closely with Muslims, with Jews, and we’ve learned and been strengthened from those experiences. For us, though, this is what brings us to this work.

We’ve had very close connections with some leading Sh’ia and Sunni clerics in Baghdad. And maybe it’s because they see us as people of faith as well. I think that common commitment to faith has opened doors we wouldn’t have open if we were secular peacemakers. I think that’s key.

Which clerics did you have a relationship with?

We’ve worked with Sheik Moayyad [Ibrahim al-Aadhami] at the Abu Hanifa Mosque in the Adamya district, and Sayyid Ali [Mussawi al Waahd], the overseer at the Kadim shrine. We met regularly with them, especially with Sheik Moayyad, because we were working with detainees and we would often take delegations to his mosque.

With Sayyid Ali we were there for Ashura [a Shiite religious festival banned under Saddam Hussein; 180 people were reported killed by suicide bombers during the festival on March 2, 2004]. Half our team was there with Sayyid Ali when the big explosions happened in the mall in front of the shrine. It was pretty horrendous.

How did you work with these religious leaders on human rights issues under the occupation?

Let me talk about Sheik Moayyad. Sheik Moayyad spent eight years in prison under Saddam. When he was released, he came back to lead the Abu Hanifa mosque.

He said that one day an Apache helicopter opened up on a minaret, there was an attack in the area of the mosque, and about 45 people were killed. He talked about going outside the front to see dozens of tanks and Humvees right outside his mosque. He asked me, “When will we learn to talk with people about our differences? When will we learn to resolve our differences as human beings even though we are on different sides of an issue, rather than shooting at each other?” He’s one of the people that gives me hope that things can change over there.

We’ve regularly gone to Sheik Moayyad for help documenting detainee abuse. He’s given us names, we’ve worked with those detainees, heard the stories from the prisons, from the intake detention facilities used by the military. He knows many of the people personally, and he tells us, “This person I can’t vouch for, but these people I can vouch for. The charges against them are false.” He’d make suggestions, who we should talk to, and somebody from the mosque would usually take us to the house, or they’d bring the person to the mosque and we’d interview them there. Because of Sheik Moayyad, we had those connections, and built personal relationships with people.

Sayyid Ali, I don’t think we had any detainee cases from his community. But because he’s in charge of the biggest Shia mosque in Baghdad, and is close to Ayatollah al-Sistani, he’d probably say it’s time for the occupation to end. He’s been patient so far with the occupation, but the United States needs to let Iraqi political leadership make the decisions to shape the future. Whether the U.S. military presence can continue, when the elections should take place — he believes those should be decisions made by Iraqis, not by U.S. appointees. He would be considered a moderate Shiite, but even the moderates are losing their patience at this point.

What do you hope CPT’s work will accomplish?

Accountability. And I hope it opens up a new way for us to understand those categorized as our “enemy.” We try to tell the story of people on the other side of barriers, that can easily become dehumanized if we don’t know them.

Also, I think our presence helps make it safer for U.S. soldiers. Because more Iraqis need to meet Americans who aren’t carrying guns and don’t ride in tanks.

After 9/11, our government turned to torture, seeking information about the terrorists who committed the atrocity and others who might follow after them. Senior officials ordered the torture of men at military bases and detention facilities in Afghanistan and Iraq, in secret CIA prisons set up across the globe, and in other countries – including Libya and Egypt — where abusive regimes were asked to do Washington’s dirty work.

The best known of all the prisons remains Guantanamo on the southeast coast of Cuba. For years, the United States naval base there seemed like an isolated vestige of the Cold War – defying the occasional threat from Fidel Castro to shut it down. But since 9/11, Guantanamo – Gitmo – has been a detention center, an extraterritorial island jail considered outside the jurisdiction of US civilian courts and rules of evidence. Like the notorious Room 101 of George Orwell’s “1984,” the chamber that contains the thing each victim fears the most to make them confess, Guantanamo’s name has become synonymous with torture. Nearly 800 people have been held there. George W. Bush eventually released 500 of them, sometimes after years of confinement and cruelty. Barack Obama has freed 67, but 169 remain, even though the president pledged to close the Guantanamo prison within a year of his inauguration. Now, forty-six are so dangerous, our government says, they will be held indefinitely, without trial.

We almost never see the detainees. Were it not for the work of human rights organizations and the forest of lawsuits that have arisen from our actions, the prisoners would be out of sight, out of mind. Five of the Guantanamo prisoners were recently arraigned before a military commission for their role in the attacks. One of them is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who says he was the mastermind behind 9/11. He was waterboarded by interrogators 183 times. Pentagon officials predict it will be at least another year before the five go on trial.

Earlier this month, lawyers for Mohammed al-Qahtani – the so-called “20th hijacker” who didn’t make it onto the planes — filed suit in New York federal court to make public what they described as “extremely disturbing” videotapes of his interrogations.  He was charged in 2008 with war crimes and murder but the charges were dropped after the former convening authority for the Guantanamo military commissions, Susan Crawford, told journalist Bob Woodward that al-Qahtani’s treatment “met the legal definition of torture.”

He remains in indefinite detention, as does Abu Zubaydah, a Saudi citizen alleged to have run terrorist training camps. He was waterboarded at least 83 times in a single month.  Just this week a federal appeals court refused to release information on the interrogation methods the CIA used on Abu Zubaydah and other terrorist suspects.

You may also have seen the flurry of action this month around a section of the new National Defense Authorization Act that allows the military to detain indefinitely not only members of al Qaeda, the Taliban and “associated forces” but anyone who has “substantially supported” them.  A federal court struck down that provision in response to journalists and advocates who believe it could be so broadly interpreted it would violate civil liberties.  Nonetheless, two days after the court’s decision, the House of Representatives reaffirmed the original provision.

The other day, eight members of the Bush Administration – including President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld – were found guilty of torture and other war crimes by an unofficial tribunal meeting in Malaysia.  The story was played widely in parts of the world press, with reports that the judgment could lead the way to proceedings before the International Criminal Court in The Hague. It received almost no mention here in the United States.

This summer, it’s believed that the United States Senate’s intelligence committee finally will release a report on “enhanced interrogation techniques,” that euphemistic phrase for what any reasonable person not employed by the government would call torture. The report has been three years in the making, with investigators examining millions of classified documents. The news service Reuters says the report will conclude that techniques such as waterboarding and sleep deprivation do not yield worthwhile intelligence information.

So here we are, into our eleventh year after 9/11, still at war in Afghanistan, still at war with terrorists, still at war with our collective conscience as we grapple with how to protect our country from attack without violating the basic values of civilization — the rule of law, striving to achieve our aims without corrupting them, and restraint in the use of power over others, especially when exercised in secret.

In future days and years, how will we come to cope with the reality of what we have done in the name of security? Many other societies do seem to try harder than we do to come to terms with horrendous behavior commissioned or condoned by a government. Beginning in 1996, in South Africa, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission held hearings at which whites and blacks struggled to confront the cruelty inflicted on human beings during apartheid.

And perhaps you caught something said the other day by the president of Brazil, Dilma Roussef.  During the early seventies she was held in prison and tortured repeatedly by the military dictators who ruled her country for nearly 25 years. The state of Rio de Janeiro has announced it will officially apologize to her. Earlier, when she swore in members of a commission investigating the dictatorship, President Roussef said: “We are not moved by revenge, hate or a desire to rewrite history. The need to know the full truth is what moves us.”

In other words, “You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.”

Based on published histories and his firsthand observations, and adapted from a lecture delivered in November, the article calls the administration’s rationale for its use of torture — which he nonetheless insists only on calling “extreme interrogation” and “coercive methods” — “radical,” “an amazing contention,” “untenable and extreme,” “unsustainable,” “an unprecedented program of coolly calculated dehumanizing abuse and physical torment,” and, finally, simply a “mistake.” He concludes: “This was a collective failure of American public leadership, in which a number of officials and members of Congress (and staffers) of both parties played a part, endorsing a CIA program of physical coercion without any precedent in U.S. history.”  In fact, “The only defense against criminal prosecution would be that officials acted in good faith reliance on the advice of their government lawyers.”

Part of what makes Zelikow’s analysis so damning and definitive is its judiciousness. The article is deeply empathetic of the uniquely fearful situation under which the Bush administration was initially operating. Zelikow calls the Sept. 11 attacks a “collective trauma” and a “shoc[k] to mass beliefs.” He notes that Bush and others spent time in burn units, morgues and with survivors of the attacks. One traumatic experienced often overlooked — overlooked because it appeared in Stephen Hayes’ stenographic biography of Dick Cheney — was that the vice-president’s daughter was (falsely, it turns out) told that her house with her children in it had tested positive for anthrax. Similarly, Cheney and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice were told that they and others had been exposed to an extremely lethal toxin in a particular area of the White House — and might soon die as a result. “The alarms did not stop and they too were not abstract … The pressure on Bush and his senior advisers was so direct because so much of the response had to be invented and improvised,” the article reads.

An additional factor in the power of the article is Zelikow’s credibility and history. Before entering government, he was a civil rights lawyer in Texas battling the Ku Klux Klan and then a highly esteemed Harvard historian specializing in U.S. foreign policy — he co-authored one book with Rice. He then served on the National Security Council under President George H.W. Bush and directed the 9/11 Commission before becoming counselor to Rice at the State Department from 2005 to 2007. He currently volunteers part-time on the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board under President Obama.

Such bipartisan, establishment credentials render the breakdown and conclusion of this article all the more damning. He believes that what should have been a political and moral question — should the United States torture captives? — became strictly a legal matter left up to government lawyers, few of whom had any experience with these issues, and who had to take the necessity of extreme measures as a given. “These lawyers then became secular priests, granting absolution to the supplicant policymakers,” Zelikow writes.

The problems began when the Office of the Vice President and the CIA took central roles in policymaking. Cheney felt himself above the rest of the National Security Council, bypassing Rice and other traditional channels of national security policymaking. Ad-hoc decision-making and improvisation became “a habit of thought,” which seemed initially to pay off in the security of the nation, as well as in Bush’s political standing and self-confidence.

With Cheney and CIA head George Tenet “the key entrepreneurs in setting codes of conduct for the War on Terror,” it was essentially left to their obsequious lawyers to decide, in secret, on the interrogation methods America should employ. Bush even told the Senate’s Intelligence Committee chairman that “the vice president should be your point of contact … [He] has the portfolio for intelligence activities.” Decisions were made to jettison international treaties. By December 2001, the CIA was already interested in reverse-engineering methods “heretofore used only to treat Americans to resist enemy torture.” When a senior al-Qaida member was captured in March 2002, the prototype for the administration’s torture policies was already developed. “So, for the first time in American history, leaders of the U.S. government carefully devised ways and means to torment enemy captives.”

Zelikow notes that “None of the policy or moral issues connected with these choices appear to have been analyzed in any noticeable way.” Perhaps worst of all, no serious consideration was given to weighing the costs of benefits of the torture program, with reference to relevant historical precedents and/or examinations of the respective French, British and Israeli experiences in dealing with captured terrorists. “Bush and Rice should have insisted on this,” Zelikow writes.

The 52-page article observes the successes of Obama’s counterterrorism policies after repudiating the use of torture. On the basis of the empirical evidence then, “[t]here is no evident correlations between intelligence success and the available of extreme interrogation methods,” no matter what Bush and Cheney claim. Finally, “The program’s costs — which include the high-level effort expended in order to establish, maintain, and defense the program — appear on the evidence so far to have well outweighed any unique value the program might have had as a method of counterterrorism intelligence collection.” This is apart from the damage to America’s international standing and corrosion of its traditional values.

Zelikow concludes his analysis by arguing that, although the Obama administration has the right to wage war and use extralegal methods to defeat al-Qaida, its claim of that authority to defeat “associated forces” is unwarranted. “The U.S. government should publish and explain any overarching policy and legal documents that guide and confine the conduct of deadly operation against its foreign enemies … the executive branch of the U.S. government has a duty to articulate the scope of its warfare to the Congress and the public.” The Bush administration’s unprecedented elevation of torture to national policy may be history, but the job to get U.S. foreign policy in line with its constitutional and moral obligations is far from over.

The memo argues that the Convention Against Torture, and the Constitution’s prohibitions against cruel and unusual punishment, do indeed apply to the CIA’s use of “waterboard[ing], walling, dousing, stress positions, and cramped confinement.” Zelikow further wrote in the memo that “we are unaware of any precedent in World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, or any subsequent conflict for authorized, systematic interrogation practices similar to those in question here, even when the prisoners were presumed to be unlawful combatants.” According to the memo, the techniques are legally prohibited, even if there is a compelling state interest to justify them, since they should be considered cruel and unusual punishment and “shock the conscience.”

Chillingly, the memo notes that “corrective techniques, such as slaps,” may be legally sustained, as might be “[C]ontrol conditions, such as nudity, sleep deprivation, and liquid diets…depending on the circumstances and details of how these techniques are used.” However much distress Zelikow’s memo caused the White House, it was not an ACLU briefing paper.

“I’m pleased the memo is now part of the historical record and available for study,” Zelikow wrote Salon in an email. The White House had determined that the memo — which was not binding since Zelikow’s was a bureaucratic position without legal authority — was too dangerous to exist. “I later heard the memo was not considered appropriate for further discussion and that copies of my memo should be collected and destroyed,” he said in a May 2009 congressional hearing.

At that hearing, before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Administrative Oversight and the Courts, Zelikow said he had “no view on whether former officials should be prosecuted,” a decision he thinks should be left to “institutions.” However, he did call for a thorough inquiry and a public report examining how the U.S. came to employ torture.

Of course, no such inquiry was ever launched. The Obama administration declined to revisit the U.S. employment of torture, with the president saying he didn’t want to “look back.” Zelikow believes this was a mistake. “I still believe an inquiry would be useful, though less so as time passes and more information becomes available, especially after the 9/11 trials conclude, hopefully this year,” he says in an email.

During his congressional testimony, Zelikow declined to say whether Department of Justice lawyers acted improperly or immorally, conceding only that their opinions were “unsound, even unreasonable.” But in a 2007 lecture in Houston, he had no problem saying “the cool, carefully considered, methodical, prolonged, and repeated subjection of captives to physical torment, and the accompanying psychological terror, is immoral.”

The importance of the memo lies in its revelation that there was real, serious debate inside the Bush administration about how to interrogate captured terrorist suspects. The members of the White House declined to enter that debate — indeed, they did their best to squash it. The destruction of Zelikow’s carefully reasoned memo suggests the White House did not want any record of alternative views even existing, lest they be considered reasonable or people get the idea that the torture policies were thought controversial even by members of the administration.

The records from this lawsuit between two sub-contractors involved in the renditions will eventually be taught in an undergrad history course titled “America: Where It All Went Wrong.” Detainees were transported by the same companies that fly billionaires on private jets to their resort vacations. (The CIA doesn’t have an air force, so they relied on massive government contractor DynCorp, which… just rented some private planes.)

We learn that the CIA provided the flights with letters from a fictional State Department official (the State Department was almost certainly not involved in the rendition program) providing diplomatic cover.

We learn that one the planes used to transport a suspect (Abu Omar, captured in Italy and tortured in Egypt) was owned by the co-owner of the Boston Red Sox. The plane sported a Red Sox logo on the tail. I mean a Yankees plane might’ve been more poetically apt but either way it seems like such a pat symbol of America’s behavior in the wretched first decade of the 21st century that I’d roll my eyes at it if it turned up in a piece of fiction. An executive’s private plane, sporting the logo of a rich baseball team and carrying an Imam captured overseas by the CIA, touches down in Egypt, a nation led by an American-backed strongman, where the Imam is to be tortured. What preachy liberal hack dreamed up that one? (The executive also owns part of Liverpool FC, because we can’t forget Great Britain’s help in all this.)

Then the hedge funds took an interest in privatized torture:

DynCorp was purchased in 2003 by Computer Sciences Corp., another leading federal contractor, in a $940 million merger. Computer Sciences Corp. then took on a supervising role in the rendition flights through 2006, according to invoices and emails in the court files. CSC sold three DynCorp units in 2005 to Veritas Capital Fund, a private equity firm, for $850 million, but retained ownership of other parts of the old company. Veritas in turn sold the restructured DynCorp — now known as DynCorp International — for about $1 billion in 2010 to Cerebrus Capital Management, another private equity fund.

So at least a couple rich people got even richer off of our national shame. There’s an upside to everything.

Investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill discussed the issue with Keith Olbermann Thursday. He recalled an incident he had investigated (which would not be classified as waterboarding) of a former Guantanamo detainee having a high pressure water hose fixed up a nostril. Water would be forced up his head until suffocation.

Scahill noted President Obama’s “extremely poor record” at holding people accountable for torturous acts and expressed concern that little has changed at Guantanamo.

Rumsfeld currently faces a lawsuit over the alleged use of torture, bought by a former military translator held in Iraq for nine months, but Scahill emphasized that the U.S. administration always tends to get its people off the hook.

Watch the clip for “Countdown” below: