From Empty Wheel:

"Here's how Whitehouse described the questions they're asking in his Senate speech the other day. "I see three issues we need to grapple with. The first is the torture itself: What did Americans do? In what conditions of humanity and hygiene were the techniques applied? With what intensity and duration? Are our preconceptions about what was done based on the sanitized descriptions of techniques justified? Or was the actuality far worse?

Were the carefully described predicates for the torture techniques and the limitations on their use followed in practice? Or did the torture exceed the predicates and bounds of the Office of Legal Counsel opinions?"

I've wanted to point out something, for a long time, about Republican rhetoric concerned with regulation. I think this gives me a leverage point.

Sadly, it looks like even the Democrats have adopted the Republican Party line:

We can look at torture (NB: torture is simply formalized sadism) as a behavior that can be regulated; as behavior that can be controlled.

If the thing is described in detail; specifying when this must occur; and in what proportion; and how it must be combined with this, but not that; and so on...then it, by virtue of these regulations, becomes something other than torture; and so, becomes (via rhetorical legerdemain) enhanced interrogation.

That set of rules, procedures, and prescriptions are the essence of regulation...the fundamental directives of a Torture Bureaucracy.

Yet they decry regulation of health care; tobacco; almost anything, in fact; and certainly, the regulation of our common economy as suboptimal, undesirable, even harmful.

Yet they know how to regulate and formalize sadism.

Also implied here is that they or their designated agents know how to control the Americans who apply the formalized sadism.

This is a Torture Bureacracy. Make no mistake about that.