Part one of this series can be found here: Return of the Torture Monsters: Here We Go Again 

Recently, the ACLU highlighted one of the torture architects of our past. In early 2002, then National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice appeared in a video outlining then-President George W. Bush’s role in establishing the 54-country torture regime of his War on Terror. In this stark revelation, Rice indicates that President Bush asked the CIA if torture was necessary and the Department of Justice if it was legal – a carefully constructed process designed to yield the result the administration sought.

Let us remember that when the shocking Abu Ghraib torture was brought to light in early 2004 by soldiers following their duty under the Uniform Code of Military Justice to report detainee abuse, the world recoiled in horror. The high-level civilians who had institutionalized torture quickly retreated from responsibility. Soldiers were court-martialed or faced administrative discipline, while CIA operators and Justice Department officials appeared to evade meaningful accountability.

What is particularly galling about Rice’s video is her admission that the President consulted the CIA and DOJ but deliberately excluded the Department of Defense JAGs – the very military legal experts whose subordinates were ultimately punished for carrying out the orders flowing down from presidential authority.

Let us remember what we now know: that the CIA and DOJ Office of Legal Counsel engaged in a dangerous dance, wherein the CIA presented fantastical, horrific hypotheticals, and based on these manufactured “facts,” the Office of Legal Counsel constructed its tortured legal analysis. Let us remember that the Office of Legal Counsel lacked expertise in international law – that knowledge resided with the Legal Adviser at State, who was carefully kept outside the decision-making circle, along with uniformed military lawyers.

When they finally had to be consulted – through William Taft IV, the former General Counsel of the Ronald Reagan-era Department of Defense, and indirectly through Colin Powell, Secretary of State and former Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff – their objections were summarily dismissed. Let us remember one of the most poignant moments in this dark chapter: when Taft, learning of the impending policy in early January 2002, drafted a 32-page, single-spaced analysis in just 36 hours that systematically dismantled the infamous torture memos.

In 2006, I led the successful effort to have the American Society of International Law adopt, almost unanimously at its Annual Meeting, the Centennial Resolution on Laws of War and Detainee Treatment – then ASIL President Alvarez also called it the Davis Resolution. Rice spoke at that Annual Meeting, and President Alvarez ensured she received the resolution – at that time, only the eighth resolution adopted in the organization’s century-long history. Later, in 2016, the American Psychological Association scrutinized and condemned its role through its policies and members in facilitating torture.

Yet today, despite various legal changes, resolutions, and reports concluding that torture was neither effective nor necessary, Rice brazenly defends these practices as having kept America safe. This compulsion to justify the abominable by those who orchestrated it serves as a warning to all Americans about the perversion that comes from exercising power without restraint, in violation of law and human dignity.

Rice’s video inadvertently serves as a condemnation of the administrative machinations of that era. The deliberate exclusion of military and international law experts from the process until decisions were effectively finalized reveals how a torture regime is bureaucratically constructed – by exploiting the forms of normal procedure while deliberately undermining its substance.

And it demonstrates the sheer audacity of these architects of torture who, knowing the United States has proven incapable of holding them accountable for their war crimes, continue to defend their actions instead of maintaining a chastened silence and retreating into the shadows of deserved disrepute.

Let us stare unflinchingly at this history as we confront the present. Let us remember how easily legal processes can be corrupted when power operates without genuine oversight or moral constraint. Let us not forget how institutions can be weaponized against the very principles they were created to uphold.

Benjamin G. Davis is an Emeritus Professor of Law at the University of Toledo College of Law in Ohio.