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u.s. war crimes: torture as official bush administration policy103proval of waterboarding radically changes the torture debate. 62 Given thatapprovals came from the highest possible level within the U.S. government,prosecution of anyone within the U.S. has become virtually impossible.Exercise of universal jurisdiction by foreign governments becomes politicallymuch harder. It seems reasonable that the admissions detailed belowwere not inadvertent, but were, rather, a determined effort to staunch thecalls for investigation into, and prosecution of, abusive interrogation at thehands of the CIA.For several years we have known that former Secretary of Defense, DonaldRumsfeld, was directly involved with torture; that he set down techniques,including chaining to the floor, stripping, hooding, and the use of dogs atGuantanamo and Abu Ghraib and that he was personally involved in Mohamedal-Qahtani’s case, 63 where “[I]nterrogators subjected him to eighteento twenty hours per day of aggressive interrogation for forty-eight days overa fifty-four day period. During this time, his body temperature fell to ninetyfivedegrees on two occasions, and his pulse dropped to a life-threateningthirty-five beats per minute.” 64Al-Qahtani’s treatment has been well documented using an official interrogationlog obtained by Time Magazine, 65 but unlike the treatment of some ofthe other detainees it is not a matter of taking the word of the victim over officialdenials. The administration could not plausibly respond in al-Qahtani’scase (as it so often did) that members of al-Qaeda are trained to claim thatthey have been tortured and therefore, those claims are not believable.What we did not know until ABC News broke the story in 2008 was justhow far into the White House the orders to torture went; we now know thatthe authorization to torture al-Qaeda suspects reached the highest levels ofthe White House. 66 According to ABC News’s report, senior administrationofficials held dozens of meetings in the White House Situation Room specificallyto approve the precise techniques used against individual detainees.Chaired by then National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice, a meetingincluding Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, Secretaryof State Powell, CIA director Tenet, and Attorney General Ashcroftdecided the minutiae of torture down to the specific number of times thatCIA agents could use a specific tactic such as pushing, slapping, sleep deprivationor waterboarding.President Bush knew that these officials were meeting to discuss theseinterrogations and approved. According to an ABC News Report on April11, President Bush said, “[w]ell, we started to connect the dots in order toprotect the American people,” continuing to the ABC News team, “yes, I’maware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved.” 67 Thus,