Whether intentional or not, one of the CIA’s own men went on national television and actually admitted that he water boarded (ie: tortured) a man under the CIA’s custody. The BBC has more info:

John Kiriakou told US broadcaster ABC that “water-boarding” was used when his CIA team questioned suspected al-Qaeda chief recruiter Abu Zubaydah.

He said it might be torture but that it “broke” the detainee in seconds.

I think what bothers me more is what he says afterwards:

“Like a lot of Americans, I’m involved in this internal, intellectual battle with myself weighing the idea that water-boarding may be torture versus the quality of information that we often get after using the water-boarding technique. And I struggle with it.”

Excuse me? We as Americans signed onto the Geneva Conventions because we already intellectually, humanely, and morally believed that torture was wrong. Heck, the CIA even said such a thing back when the USSR was the ‘evil empire.’

Calipygian raises an interesting point:

 In effect, this guy has admitted to breaking the law, possibly even committing a war crime. Will he finger his superiors now? And remember - the Nuremburg defense didn’t save anyone after World War II.

but forgets one thing first in my opinion: How long until someone files a war crime suite within or outside of the United States against him?

All that of course should be tied in together with the White House refusal to comment and infamously state that this is an ongoing criminal investigation over the destruction of those tapes with the following takeaway by David Kurtz at Talking Points Memo:

 The key takeaway is that the White House counsel, presumably at the direction of the Department of Justice, has ordered the preservation of all White House documents pertaining to the CIA tapes.