Torture. Hey, You Know What? I've Been Right About Everything.

Gee. What do you know. ZERO INTELLECTUAL CURIOSITY. What a shocker.

- According to several former top officials involved in the discussions seven years ago, they did not know that the military training program, called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, had been created decades earlier to give American pilots and soldiers a sample of the torture methods used by Communists in the Korean War, methods that had wrung false confessions from Americans

- The top officials he briefed did not learn that waterboarding had been prosecuted by the United States in war-crimes trials after World War II

- They did not know that some veteran trainers from the SERE program itself had warned in internal memorandums that, morality aside, the methods were ineffective. (gee..who's been saying that for years now?)

- The process was “a perfect storm of ignorance and enthusiasm,” a former C.I.A. official said.

- A little research on the origin of those methods would have given reason for doubt. Government studies in the 1950s found that Chinese Communist interrogators had produced false confessions from captured American pilots not with some kind of sinister “brainwashing” but with crude tactics: shackling the Americans to force them to stand for hours, keeping them in cold cells, disrupting their sleep and limiting access to food and hygiene.

Worse, the study found that under such abusive treatment, a prisoner became “malleable and suggestible, and in some instances he may confabulate.”

- “The very programs that are among the most risky and controversial, and that therefore should get the greatest congressional oversight,” she said, “in fact get the least.”