War Crimes

A top adviser to former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice warned the Bush administration that its use of “cruel, inhuman or degrading” interrogation techniques like waterboarding were “a felony war crime.”

What’s more, newly obtained documents reveal that State Department counselor Philip Zelikow told the Bush team in 2006 that using the controversial interrogation techniques were “prohibited” under U.S. law — “even if there is a compelling state interest asserted to justify them.”

[...]

Zelikow’s warnings about the legal dangers of torture went unheeded — not just by the Bush administration, which ignored them, but, ironically, by the Obama administration, which effectively refuted them. In June, the Justice Department concluded an extensive inquiry into CIA torture by dropping potential charges against agency interrogators in 99 out of 101 cases of detainee abuse. That inquiry did not examine criminal complicity for senior Bush administration officials who designed the torture regimen and ordered agency interrogators to implement it.

[...]

Zelikow first revealed the existence of his secret memo, dated Feb. 15, 2006, in an April 2009 blog post, shortly after the Obama administration disclosed many of its predecessor’s legal opinions blessing torture. He briefly described it (.pdf) in a contentious Senate hearing shortly thereafter, revealing then that “I later heard the memo was not considered appropriate for further discussion and that copies of my memo should be collected and destroyed.”

  Wired

I guess you should be happy YOU weren't collected and destroyed.

UPDATE:

Taking phone calls from Karl Rove while you're allegedly conducting an independent review of an event to which screw-ups by Rove's boss and your own were so central was probably not a good idea. Whatever "felony war crimes" he believed were being committed at the time he wrote this memo, they apparently weren't serious enough to quit over, much less bring to light.

  Charles Pierce

Yes, not an uncommon condition of the Bush era. However, now it seems that there isn't a handful of officials who object or even have any doubts as to how things are being run in the Obama White House.