The best article so far on the Red Cross report is Mark Danner's lengthy piece in the New York Review of Books. Danner has been on the torture case for years, and presents an excellent history and summary of the Bush torture system, along with its craven approval by the Democratic-controlled Congress in the notorious -- and never-repealed -- Military Commissions Act of 2007. [For more on this act and other authoritarian encroachments, see here , here and here.]

Danner also lets the tortured speak for themselves, in the harrowing testimonies they gave to the Red Cross. Danner's entire article deserves a close reading but it should be remembered that while the article and the Red Cross report focus on the treatment of 14 "high-value detainees" in CIA custody, many if not most of the same torture techniques used on these "hard cases" were also employed on countless other captives swept up by the thousands in the Terror War dragnets.

Remember too that according to the Red Cross, at one time up to 70 to 90 percent of the thousands of captives held by the Americans in Iraq were innocent of any crime whatsoever. For torture, like rain, falls on both the just and the unjust.