That’s me being wrong. Here’s the Post with a direct quote:

“President Bush says he was aware that his top aides met in the White House basement to micromanage the application of waterboarding and other widely-condemned interrogation techniques. And he says it was no big deal.

‘I’m aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved,’ Bush told ABC News’ Martha Raddatz on Friday. ‘I don’t know what’s new about that; I’m not so sure what’s so startling about that.’ ”

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Tim, there will be no truth and reconciliation, because the Republicans believe that nothing wrong has been done. Torture is an American value, as far as they are concerned.

In dozens of top-secret talks and meetings in the White House, the most senior Bush administration officials discussed and approved specific details of how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency, sources tell ABC News.

The so-called Principals who participated in the meetings also approved the use of “combined” interrogation techniques — using different techniques during interrogations, instead of using one method at a time — on terrorist suspects who proved difficult to break, sources said.

Highly placed sources said a handful of top advisers signed off on how the CIA would interrogate top al Qaeda suspects — whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called waterboarding.

The high-level discussions about these “enhanced interrogation techniques” were so detailed, these sources said, some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed — down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic.

The advisers were members of the National Security Council’s Principals Committee, a select group of senior officials who met frequently to advise President Bush on issues of national security policy.

At the time, the Principals Committee included Vice President Cheney, former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, as well as CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft.

As the national security adviser, Rice chaired the meetings, which took place in the White House Situation Room and were typically attended by most of the principals or their deputies. …

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Unless the President himself is engaged with an issue, policymaking doesn’t get any higher-level than the NSC Principals committee. While Bush will have made clear what he wanted, I wonder if he was foolish enough to leave any written, or more likely taped, evidence.

The memo was authored by John Yoo. This memorandum was designed to authorize the introduction of torture and other cruel, inhuman and degrading interrogation techniques to be used upon prisoners held at Guantánamo, and ultimately also used in Afghanistan and Iraq. The memorandum authorized waterboarding, long-time standing, hypothermia, the administration of psychotropic drugs and sleep deprivation in excess of two days in addition to a number of other techniques. Each of these techniques is long established as torture as a matter of American and international law. The application and implementation of these techniques was and is a crime. …

Following the implementation of these techniques, more than 108 detainees died in detention. In a large number of these cases, the deaths have been ruled a homicide and connected to torture. These homicides were a forseeable consequence of the advice that Haynes and Yoo gave.

Calling it “work for hire” reminds me of “just following orders” in the various Nuremberg trials. Tenure seems a fully second-order question. If Berkeley wants to be known as the place that harbors enablers of war crimes, I suppose that is its business.

I mentioned two: removal of tenure and censure. And I think his actions and those of others in the administration warrant an investigation, but as I said, in the present circumstances that won’t happen.

As for verdict first and trial next, that is just so much rubbish. The presumption of innocence in not incumbent on me. If I were a juror or serving in some other role in this case then I would disqualify myself. But it is nice to see you seek the protection of the law, when you approve Mr. Yoo’s plan to deny it to others.

You will have to ask Herr Burke what he meant in his remarks. I know what I meant and you can read what I wrote. If you and Herr Burke think that firing is good enough then that is up to you, but that is not what I suggested. As my father said, repeatedly, “a man who does not read, might as well be a man who cannot read.”

Recall, though, that this whole thread began with Tim’s mischievous equation of Yoo with Churchill and his suggestion that we should treat Yoo the same as Churchill because he is “just as big a hack when it comes to constitutional law as Ward Churchill was when it came to Native American history.” Churchill got fired, something Tim disagreed with, so you can see why one might conclude that Tim’s logic also called for Yoo’s firing. Your 5:33 post complaining about my suggestion that tenure protected Yoo from firing also led me to the conclusion that you believed it didn’t — that is, that he should be fired regardless of tenure. I confess that I didn’t dream you had something more serious in mind when you referred to “the punishment he deserves.” Since I’m not aware of any law he violated, it didn’t occur to me that you were suggesting criminal punishment. In fact, I asked you about three times to tell us what law or ethical rule he violated. Don’t you think it’s about time you either put up or quiet down?

(By the way, Tim, your initial language was atypically harsh, saying that Yoo made claims “that are just factually wrong or are screamingly disingenuous.” Don’t you owe it to your reader to cite those factual errors and screaming disingenuities? Chapter and verse, and all that. I assume you read the memos before writing that sentence, so it should be easy for you to pick out the portions that are so flagrantly wrong. Or is it enough for a blogger to piggyback on press judgments without having to justify doing so? I don’t find those things in the memos. I fault him instead for his judgment calls.)

Nowhere in any of my sputtering did I call for firing Yoo. That is a word that you keep trying to put on my lips, but I never uttered it. I have other punishments in mind.