From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media.

Brooke Gladstone is out this week. I'm Bob Garfield.

The story in Thursday's New York Times was staggering.

The Bush administration, despite repeated repudiation of its interrogation practices by both Congress and the courts, twice secretly authorized

painful and frightening physical and psychological measures against terror suspects.

The story, based on interviews and leaked administration memos, portrayed the Justice Department

Office of Legal Counsel and Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez himself,

not as protectors of the Constitution and disinterested arbiters of the law,

but as advocates of Bush-Cheney policy right or wrong.

The result, legal opinions sanctioning, head-slapping, sleep deprivation,

frigid temperatures, and simulated drowning

known as waterboarding. Both opinions were rendered after the Justice Department publicly declared

torture is abhorrent both to American law and values and to international norms. White House

Press Secretary Dana Perino did not deny the

authenticity of the documents. She did assert that handcuffing prisoners naked in 50-degree cells

and soaking their hooded faces with water to make them fierce suffocation constitute lawful

interrogation, if not to Congress and the courts, at least to the president.

The policy of the United States is not to torture. The president has not authorized it. He will not authorize it.

In much of the blogosphere, the Times investigation was regarded as a smoking gun in the red hands of an administration that interprets the Constitution and

international law as it sees fit. A liberal commentator at the site Hullabaloo titled her posting,

Sociopathic Governance, and chillingly invoked Hannah Arend's phrase, the banality of evil.

The House Judiciary Committee and the Senate Intelligence Committee demanded that the Justice

...