So "rectal rehydration" is the new euphemism for anal rape.
Here we are in the 2000s, and the CIA is still using rape as an interrogation/torture technique.
So maybe there will be a drama over this for a bit, a little theater. But the CIA can take it. This is a reoccurring formula. The CIA, or someone, makes a call or takes an action that was wrong, or a mistake, or is later thought to be questionable, unintentionally or intentionally, and they take a little heat for what amounts to a moment of public attention. Congresses come and go. Presidential administrations come and go. But the CIA remains. This is actually an old, tried-and-true schtick. And the real puppet masters know that the CIA is good at taking the heat and ultimately sloughing it off.
What this reminds us, or should remind us, is that the real culprits, the Bush Cabal, enabled by snakes like John Yoo and David Addington, determined that it was above the law and could do anything it liked, that, yes, the ends, like torture, justify whatever means. Well, didn't they at least have the decency to include that little restrainer, "...as long as it doesn't cause organ failure," or some such?
It seems laughable to me, in an unpleasant way, that there seems to be a question being bandied about whether the CIA was somehow renegade, or something, as though they did anything that wasn't more-or-less sanctioned from above, or that they weren't encouraged to do.
Like it was said on the first page of replies, it would be a surprise if George W. knew all the details; they would be smart enough to provide him with plausible deniability, even if at the same time they were standing on the assertion that the president's war time powers set him above the law.
I think a more interesting question is, did the real president, Dick Cheney, know the details? Though again, probably not.
But either way, it was the administration that determined the moral and ethical climate, or lack there of, which produced this kind of stuff.