George Orwell... meet Franz Kafka

"Add it all up -- only what's been revealed so far -- and you have a global system of injustice and torture, purposely mounted in the moral and legal darkness, beyond the reach or oversight of anyone but the President, vice-president, secretary of defense and associated officials, meant to extract information (and take revenge), meant as in Kafka's fictional penal colony to write the sentence these men had passed on the bodies of America's captives.
And talk about paper trails! If you need any evidence of the combination of arrogance, incompetence, and plain stupidity of the Bush administration, it now sits unavoidably before our eyes. Didn't they know anything about deniability? Didn't they know that you can get so much done without committing anything to paper? Didn't they know that you can signal what you want from the top without issuing orders, making direct demands, or demanding supporting opinions on paper?
Note two things here: That almost all of the above, this whole little global shop of horrors, is already documented -- quite literally in papers pouring out of the bowels of this administration. These documents are leaking daily from an administration that seems to have split open along many angry rift lines. The British Telegraph this week, writing of the leaking of a legal document on torture to the Wall Street Journal commented, for example:

"The leak appears to be part of an extraordinary civil war in the Pentagon between civilian officials and uniformed officers appalled by what they have described as moves by political appointees to shroud the war on terrorism in an ‘environment of legal ambiguity'."

Some in the military, the intelligence community, the State Department, administration legal offices, and possibly even the Justice Department opposed the creation of our mini-gulag and the kinds of interrogations and conditions planned for it; some simply feared what the illegality might do to them or their careers, including evidently Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Richard Myers who fretted that he might become "a target for prosecution under laws governing prisoner treatment"; some are undoubtedly settling scores; others protecting tattered reputations; but it's now close to open season on the administration from within.". . .
At the same time, the administration was attempting to redefine presidential power in such a way that the once normal Congressional and court checks and balances of an American republic no longer applied. In his power as commander-in-chief (again note that all other redefinitions were based on the redefinition of "war"), the President was, in various legal briefs meant for the highest officials in this administration, pronounced to be beyond any control by Congress or the courts in his acts.
Finally, having redefined the nature of war, the powers of the president, the nature of captivity, and the places of imprisonment, it was the most natural thing in the world to redefine "information extraction" within such a system so that neither international treaties like the Geneva Conventions, nor congressionally passed laws, nor the Constitution itself was applicable to them. In this sense, from the earliest days after the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration was focused on, above all else, setting up a global torture system by another name.
Much of this has recently become clearer as a series of internal documents produced by White House, Pentagon, and Justice Department lawyers have leaked out in recent weeks. To offer a Vietnam analogy, you might say that in the Vietnam era, The Pentagon Papers, that revelatory secret study ordered up by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and slipped to the New York Times by one brave whistleblower, Daniel Ellsberg, were the private, confessional equivalent of liberal guilt over the war; in the Bush era, these unbelievable lawyers' memos, some also ordered up in the privacy of the administration by the present Secretary of Defense, are the neocon equivalent of a (legalistic) guilty conscience. They are, in some perverse fashion, deeply confessional documents, and in the future, they will read that way."