Here's a must-read article now up at Salon.com:

May 18, 2009 | On April 16, the Obama administration released four memos that were used to authorize torture in interrogations during the Bush administration. When President Obama released the memos, he said, "It is our intention to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution."

Yet 13 key people in the Bush administration cannot claim they relied on the memos from the DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel. Some of the 13 manipulated the federal bureaucracy and the legal process to "preauthorize" torture in the days after 9/11. Others helped implement torture, and still others helped write the memos that provided the Bush administration with a legal fig leaf after torture had already begun.

The Torture 13 exploited the federal bureaucracy to establish a torture regime in two ways. First, they based the enhanced interrogation techniques on techniques used in the U.S. military's Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) program. The program -- which subjects volunteers from the armed services to simulated hostile capture situations -- trains servicemen and -women to withstand coercion well enough to avoid making false confessions if captured. Two retired SERE psychologists contracted with the government to "reverse-engineer" these techniques to use in detainee interrogations.

These are just the first three paragraphs of the article, which also includes a list of what they are calling "The Torture 13", each of whose role is described in detail:

1. Dick Cheney

2. David Addington

3. Alberto Gonzales

4. James Mitchell

5. George Tenet

6. Condoleeza Rice

7. John Yoo

8. Jay Bybee

9. William "Jim" Haynes

10. Donald Rumsfeld

11. John Rizzo

12. Steven Bradbury

13. George W. Bush