Former U.S. president George W. Bush knew what he wanted from his pliant justice department officials – a green light to treat 9/11 terror suspects roughly – and they were eager to oblige.
Government lawyers whose job it was to be the president's conscience "employed twisted and macabre legal reasoning to authorize the unspeakable," says David Cole, a Georgetown University law professor and contributor to the New York Times.
Americans got a depressing eyeful of the fallout from that unholy alliance this week when President Barack Obama ordered the justice department to release an inch-thick set of memos from 2002 to 2005 that authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to use a range of brutal coercive techniques.
The memos shed light on "a dark and painful chapter" in U.S. history, Obama said.
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