"They're told, 'Look, you don't have to follow the Geneva Conventions'" Greenberg continued, "'but it would be good if you could sort of, you know, be with the spirit of them.' And they look around and they're like, 'What does that mean?'"

"Make this prison Geneva Convention-ish," Stewart suggested.

"It was an 'ish' situation," agreed Greenberg, "and that does not compute for the military. ... Their idea is ... 'We know how to follow rules, that's our job, we're professionals. We don't, you know, improvise when it comes to the law.'"

"When does the word come down," Stewart asked, "that, 'Hey, you know what? We're actually not going to make it even Geneva Convention-ish. That was the honeymoon period. Now, let's make it more Dante's Inferno-ish.'"

Greenberg replied that starting in mid-February 2002, "they bring in a whole other crew" of higher-ranked officers "and it becomes their show. And they're the 'interrogation' military unit, and they take over."

Former Vice President Dick Cheney warned that there is a “high probability” that terrorists will attempt a catastrophic nuclear or biological attack in coming years, and said he fears the Obama administration’s policies will make it more likely the attempt will succeed.

In an interview Tuesday with Politico, Cheney unyieldingly defended the Bush administration’s support for the Guantanamo Bay prison and coercive interrogation of terrorism suspects.
[...]
He expressed confidence that files will some day be publicly accessible offering specific evidence that waterboarding and other policies he promoted — over sharp internal dissent from colleagues and harsh public criticism — were directly responsible for averting new Sept. 11-style attacks.

Not content to wait for a historical verdict, Cheney said he is set to plunge into his own memoirs, feeling liberated to describe behind-the-scenes roles over several decades in government now that the “statute of limitations has expired” on many of the most sensitive episodes.