Karpinski was one of two officers punished over the aggressive interrogations at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Throughout the ordeal, Karpinski maintained that she and her troops were following interrogation guidelines approved by top brass. Today, Karpinski has found validation in a few Bush-era memos released last week by the Obama administration.

The report points to then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's approval of such techniques -- including stress positions, removal of clothing, use of phobias (such as fear of dogs), and deprivation of light and auditory stimuli -- in December 2002 for detainees at the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. His OK prompted interrogators in Afghanistan and Iraq to adopt the aggressive techniques.

The guidance was delivered to Abu Ghraib by then-Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who was summoned to Baghdad from Guantanamo to evaluate the prison system.

Apparently the "left wing conspiracy theorists" who argued that what happened at Abu Ghraib came from the top and was not the product of "bad apples" were, in fact, absolutely correct about that. Rumself personally authorized this. This is a political issue.

In light of this, Obama has apparently softened his prior stance against prosecuting former administration officials. There is a risk that such prosecutions could turn into a political circus, but its starting to look like the situation is going to demand them anyway.

Its bad. Real bad.

The new report includes testimony from an Army psychologist at Guantanamo Bay who described increasingly relentless pressure from Washington in the summer of 2002 to use harsher methods on detainees. "[T]his is my opinion, even though they were giving information and some of it was useful, while we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between AI Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful in establishing a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq," Army Maj. Paul Burney told investigators. "The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish this link...there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results."

Torture used to produce false confessions needed to justify a war! That is EXACTLY why Torture is illegal.

If this is true, the leadership of the Bush administration could go to prison. This could be very, very bad for the country.

The torture row is not going to go away.