The Abuse Orders, Cheney's Office, and More Kabuki Theater

The New Yorker's Jane Mayer has a superlative piece detailing the administration's moves to sweep away prohibitions against detainee abuse. She tells the story through one Bush appointee's fight against it. The official, the Alberto Mora, was the Navy's top lawyer, and penned a lengthy, memo describing approved-interrogation techniques that constituted "at a minimum cruel and unsual treatment, and at worst, torture."

Mayer shows just how much of the "take the gloves off" edicts came from the Office of the Vice President, specifically Cheney's sidekick, David Addington.  Addington, of course, has earned the same fate as his other colleagues who've  advocated abusing detainees: promotion.
 

As for Mora, he didn't exactly climb the ladder. He's now  out of the administration. While he was there, he was actually a member of a Pentagon "working-group" that was charged in 2003 with revising detainee policies and  made them more humane--at least that's what Mora and other members of the working group thought. From the NYer:

Without Mora’s knowledge, the Pentagon had pursued a secret detention policy. There was one version, enunciated [to Congress]. And there was another, giving the operations officers legal indemnity to engage in cruel interrogations, and, when the Commander-in-Chief deemed it necessary, in torture. Legal critics within the Administration had been allowed to think that they were engaged in a meaningful process; but their deliberations appeared to have been largely an academic exercise, or, worse, a charade. “It seems that there was a two-track program here,” said Martin Lederman, a former lawyer with the Office of Legal Counsel, who is now a visiting professor at Georgetown. “Otherwise, why would they share the final working-group report with [Gitmo's commanders] but not with the lawyers who were its ostensible authors?”

In other words: the members of the detainee "working group" had policy put out in their name that they never saw, would never agree with, and happened to be illegal.