In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA's overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.

Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder, two U.S. officials said.

"The briefer was specifically asked if the methods were tough enough," said a U.S. official who witnessed the exchange.

Congressional leaders from both parties would later seize on waterboarding as a symbol of the worst excesses of the Bush administration's counterterrorism effort. The CIA last week admitted that videotape of an interrogation of one of the waterboarded detainees was destroyed in 2005 against the advice of Justice Department and White House officials, provoking allegations that its actions were illegal and the destruction was a coverup.

Yet long before "waterboarding" entered the public discourse, the CIA gave key legislative overseers about 30 private briefings, some of which included descriptions of that technique and other harsh interrogation methods, according to interviews with multiple U.S. officials with firsthand knowledge.

"On Tuesday, President Obama said some officials who developed the policy for harsh interrogation could face prosecutions."

This represents, of course, a reversal of his earlier repeated assertions that those who developed the policies of torture - let's call it what it is - will not be prosecuted. This is a good sign, but it is only happening now because of the palpable and growing public outrage about the sadism that has been American policy that more people are now aware of and unwilling to tolerate any longer. 

Obama doesn't want to go down this road. He is being forced down this road and will only go as far as he is forced to go by the people's demands.  

***

For those who wonder whether torture works, see this from someone who was tortured, Binyam Mohamed, the only person released from Gitmo since Obama's election, and whose torture included razors used to cut into his penis:

“Far from improving, Mohamed said conditions at Guantanamo have worsened since Obama was elected in November.”

... 

"Binyam added, 'I said Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had given me a false passport after I was stopped the first time in Karachi and that I had met Osama bin Laden 30 times. None of it was true. The British could have stopped the torture because they knew I had tried to use the same passport at Karachi both times. That should have told them that what I was saying under torture wasn’t true. But so far as I know, they did nothing.'

...

"Abandoned by the British government, Binyam was then subjected to 'extraordinary rendition,' and, as flight logs confirm, was flown from Islamabad to Rabat, Morocco on July 21, 2002. What happened next — 18 months of torture at the hands of the American’s proxy torturers in Morocco, who regularly cut his penis with a razor blade — has already been documented in excruciating detail, when the notes that Clive Stafford Smith compiled during a three-day interview with Binyam at Guantánamo in early 2005 were passed by the Pentagon’s military censors and published in the Guardian in August 2005. As Rose described it, Binyam did not want to talk about his experiences. 'Shuddering, he wrote, 'he says the details of what he endured in Morocco are such that he cannot bring himself to relate them again.'

...

"Binyam also said that, in the 'Dark Prison, as Rose put it, 'the thrust of his interrogations had changed,' and that, 'Since he made his fantastical confession, the Americans wanted him to become a prosecution witness' in the Military Commission trial system at Guantánamo, to testify against the alleged al-Qaeda leaders — including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah — whose supposed involvement in the spectral 'dirty bomb' plot had been pivotal to much of his torture in Morocco, where, as he has previously reported, he was, essentially, trained in what to say. In his statement to Clive Stafford Smith, he explained that, between the savage beatings and the razor cuts to his penis, his torturers 'would tell me what to say,' and added that even towards the end of his time in Morocco, they were still 'training me what to say,' and one of them told him, 'We’re going to change your brain.'”