"This government does not torture people," President Bush said in an Associated Press article. But previously secret documents unearthed by the New York Times on October 4 say otherwise, confirming once again the downhill slide into the shitpile that the Bush administration has dragged all of us into. Here's the Times' expose:

WASHINGTON, Oct. 3 — When the Justice Department publicly declared torture “abhorrent” in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations.

But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.

Mr. Gonzales approved the legal memorandum on “combined effects” over the objections of James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general, who was leaving his job after bruising clashes with the White House. Disagreeing with what he viewed as the opinion’s overreaching legal reasoning, Mr. Comey told colleagues at the department that they would all be “ashamed” when the world eventually learned of it.

Later that year, as Congress moved toward outlawing “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment, the Justice Department issued another secret opinion, one most lawmakers did not know existed, current and former officials said. The Justice Department document declared that none of the C.I.A. interrogation methods violated that standard.

The classified opinions, never previously disclosed, are a hidden legacy of President Bush’s second term and Mr. Gonzales’s tenure at the Justice Department, where he moved quickly to align it with the White House after a 2004 rebellion by staff lawyers that had thrown policies on surveillance and detention into turmoil.

Did you get that? The double-secret torture policy has been on the books for quite some time. The dance has already started: the Bush administration still says we don't torture. Our instincts say that torture works and that the ticking time-bomb can be dismantled if we force a terrorist to tell the truth. But experts actually disagree that torture works, including people with experince in the military and foreign policy. The idea is that someone will say anything to make the torture stop, and then investigators will waste time exploring that "admission" when the time is better spent tracking down real leads. Also, the most committed terrorists will not say anything useful. Meanwhile our use of torture around the world creates a blowback: our own soldiers are tortured in retaliation. These are our brothers and sisters.