Bond upset that people know the US tortured detainees, not that the US tortured detainees

Today,the Obama Administration released Bush-era Justice Department memos approving "enhanced interrogation techniques" like waterboarding. Sen. Kit Bond and others are upset that the information has been made public, preferring that the government continue to hide the abuses it conducted our behalf.  The release of the memos will "make us less safe" and "heighten anger" in parts of the world "where we're trying to make friends," Bond said.

Obama's press secretary, Robert Gibbs, dismisses Bond's protests:

I don't think and the president doesn't believe it's the existence of enhanced interrogation techniques in memos that has made us less safe...It's the use of those techniques in the view of the world that has made us less safe. And that's precisely why the president moved swiftly to end [their use]...

You can read the torture memos yourself here.

Bond's statement about their release is here.

Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic lists some of the key revelations from the memos:

• Through 2005, the CIA used "enhanced interrogation techniques" on 28 of 94 so-called "high value detainees."

• Waterboarding was theoretically allowed only in cases where the information solicited from the prisoner could thwart an imminent terrorist attack; the Justice Department permitted only "six applications of water lasting more than ten seconds" for every two-hour period during which a detainee was strapped to the board. Only 12 minutes of water torture was allowed per 24-hour period. Also: the CIA put potential waterboardees on a fluid diet before the torture in order to prevent them from choking to death on food that might be stuck in the GI tract.

• The OLC concluded that the CIA's careful application of the program didn't "shock the conscience" of a reasonable person and thus would not trigger a statute that would leave interrogators vulnerable to prosecution...

• The 2002 memo contended it was legal to place an insect in a cramped confined space with a prisoner, provided that the insect was not poisonous. The CIA wanted to use this technique on Abu Zubaydah, who was afraid of poisonous insects. Nowhere is Zubaydah's degraded mental state mentioned.

• It sanctioned techniques which caused less pain than then type of pain one would experience with a major injury

• It allowed a previously disclosed technique called "walling," involving the slamming of a detainee's head back against a fake wall.

• It presumed that the CIA interrogators did not want to cause Zubaydah "severe" mental or physical pain;

• The CIA justified its techniques by referring to the SERE program, which teachers soldiers how to avoid capture and interrogation.

Glenn Greenwald's reporting on the memos is definitely worth reading as well.

The contents of these memos make me very angry and very sad.