Beginning almost immediately after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, policies crafted inside the Bush White House set the conditions for rampant abuses by the military and CIA. In the first fearful weeks and months after the attacks, top administration lawyers in the White House and Justice Department drew up a series of secret legal memos that recast the rules for the treatment of so-called enemy combatants, those considered terrorist suspects from no easily identifiable army or nation. The memos argued that captured enemy combatants were not entitled to fundamental protections of U.S. or international law, including the obligations of the U.N. Convention Against Torture, a treaty the United States ratified in 1994 explicitly outlawing "torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment" of prisoners.

The administration also relied on a classified document known as a "presidential finding," authorizing broad covert action by the CIA to capture, detain or kill members of al-Qaida anywhere in the world. The finding, which administration legal advisors apparently ruled lawful, was signed by Bush on Sept. 17, 2001. A day later, Congress granted the administration additional power by authorizing the use of "all necessary and appropriate" military force at the discretion of the president.

This November, in response to the torture scandals, the Pentagon issued a new high-level directive requiring that interrogations be conducted using "humane" treatment. That term replaced language in an earlier draft of the directive modeled after the international rules against torture -- a change that was made following intense pressure from Cheney's office.

According to one senior Army officer, a judge advocate general who has been involved in discussions with Pentagon officials on the issue, reaching a consensus on what constitutes "humane" treatment can be exceedingly difficult -- and vague language remains precisely the strategy of the Bush administration's legal maneuverings on detention and interrogation. Pentagon officials working to revise the Army field manual have also reportedly faced stiff resistance from Cheney's office. In theory, the senior Army JAG says, the rules outlined in the current version of the manual, including 14 techniques approved for interrogations, were already well-defined enough to avert wrongdoing -- at least until the Bush administration began calling for "the gloves to come off" in the war on terror.

According to the senior Army JAG, who wasn't authorized to speak to the media and was granted anonymity by Salon, many fellow JAGs and military officers feel that the administration has long since veered into dubious territory. "There are plenty of us who think that the legal opinions put forth by the administration, while maybe passable from a technical standpoint, aren't serving our long-term interests. The feeling is that there are steep costs to the administration's views, and that we're just beginning to pay them."

It is no accident that the McCain amendment seeks to tighten controls over both the military and CIA. The two often work in concert in an ill-defined, shadowy world of prisoner capture, transport and interrogation. While some abuses took place in Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay prior to the Iraq war, conventional wisdom holds that torture only ballooned with the rise of the Iraqi insurgency. But according to one active-duty Army officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the information, U.S. intelligence operatives were working alongside the military in the Middle East well before the war even began.

"Before the invasion of Iraq, I was on an airfield in a foreign country that had an OGA site operating on it," says the Army officer. (OGA, or "other government agency," is parlance for a nonmilitary agency, typically the CIA.) "The airfield was prepped for any number of missions. It was made abundantly clear to us that those guys were self-sufficient and operated under their own set of rules. And if we didn't like that, that was too damn bad."

Robert Baer, a veteran CIA officer who operated in Iraq and across the Middle East before retiring in 1997, affirms that the CIA often works with military and private contractors, including on interrogations. He says joint operations are likely all over Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as at the "black sites," which, according to the Washington Post, were set up beginning nearly four years ago.

A recent report by Jane Mayer in the New Yorker revealed how the joint operations can shield any single agency from responsibility for torture. The killing of a terrorist suspect in U.S. hands at Abu Ghraib in 2003 may go unpunished, according to the report, because of murky circumstances over whether the military or CIA had custody of him. The prisoner, Manadel al-Jamadi, was first captured and roughed up by Navy SEALS before being handed over to a CIA interrogator at the prison. The CIA interrogator reportedly placed a bag over al-Jamadi's head, bound his hands behind his back, and hung him by his hands. Top forensics experts who examined the case said al-Jamadi, who had broken ribs, suffocated to death.

Several military investigations have fingered the CIA for operations in Iraq that essentially made prisoners like al-Jamadi disappear within the military's detention system with no record of their captivity -- a practice known as "ghosting." To date, only one agency employee has been held to account, a CIA contractor -- but not an officer -- charged for beating a prisoner to death in Afghanistan.

The CIA has never had a sterling reputation on human rights, says author Thomas Powers, though no one inside the agency would ever admit to using torture. "They've also said they don't commit assassinations," Powers says wryly. "They don't, except when they do."

Nevertheless, Bush policies appear to have corrupted the CIA to an unprecedented degree. Between the torture scandals and the prewar intelligence meltdown -- Powers says analysts were made to "hop on one leg and whistle" while pumping up bogus intelligence on Iraqi WMD -- the CIA has become an "operational arm" of the Bush White House.

The network of secret CIA prisons is particularly disturbing, Powers says, because they make prospects for oversight and accountability even dimmer. As with the military, it's likely that only the rank and file will be held accountable. "Over the last 50 years the agency has been asked many times to do extreme things," Powers says. "But almost always, whenever there's somebody to be blamed for it, nobody in the White House takes a hit."

Other CIA experts confirm that torture fails to exact useful information from prisoners, especially insurgents. "I've never seen torture solve an insurgency problem. It just makes it worse," Baer says. In addition to decrying its ineffectiveness, some veteran CIA officers, like their counterparts in the military, have begun to speak out against torture on moral grounds.

"It goes completely against the profile of people the CIA wants to recruit," Baer says, adding that officers are trained to resist interrogation, but generally not to conduct it. "This is a 180-degree turn, and it's wrecking the CIA further."

The rising backlash against torture today indicates more military and intelligence officers are realizing that the Bush administration is sinking the United States into an unprecedented moral quagmire -- one that could lead to an especially dire end. "The problems with this are huge and they're hitting home now," Powers says. "How do you let these people go, especially the ones deemed to be of no intelligence value, after they've been treated so badly? Are you just going to hold them forever? You have to ask whether or not they will eventually reach the stage of just summarily killing them. It may have happened already. This policy isn't just ineffectual -- it's complete madness."

Last summer, Sen. Richard Durbin, a senior Democrat from Illinois who co-wrote the McCain amendment, was savaged by the White House for pointed criticisms he made comparing torture at the U.S. military prison in Guantánamo Bay with Nazism and the Soviet gulags. Looking back, Durbin maintains he could have chosen his words more carefully -- but more importantly, he says, Cheney's battle against the McCain amendment represents a betrayal of America's men and women fighting on the front lines, and an "incredible contradiction" from the White House on torture.

For Durbin, who served on the Senate Intelligence Committee until last January, the revelation of the CIA "black sites" has raised new, troubling questions. "To my knowledge, it was never discussed -- whether they exist, where they exist, who runs them, and what's going on inside," Durbin said, speaking by phone from his office on Capitol Hill. "I think we absolutely need a more thorough investigation. But we'll be hard pressed to see it because it reflects directly on statements made by the president and vice president. And when it gets that delicate politically, the Senate Intelligence Committee has refused to step in."

That's been the norm under the Bush White House, Durbin adds. Cheney, he says, enjoys powerful sway over the committee. "There is a close relationship between Sen. Pat Roberts [who heads the Intelligence Committee] and the vice president. I can tell you that little or nothing was done while I served on the committee, in terms of a thorough review of our treatment of prisoners."

While Durbin and fellow lawmakers responsible for oversight were kept in the dark on covert interrogation operations, before he left the committee he and others viewed hundreds of classified photos of torture from Abu Ghraib. According to Durbin, a number of the images they witnessed were even more horrific than the public has seen to date, though he declined to go into detail, because they remain classified. "In all of my years of public service, I'll never forget that day. I was standing there in a room with fellow senators, some of whom were in tears, as we watched brought up on a screen hundreds and hundreds of photos showing the most unimaginable treatment of prisoners."

"I honestly believe that when this war is over, we'll look back on this treatment of prisoners as our own Japanese internment-camp issue," Durbin says. "It's further illustration that when a nation is in fear, as we are of continued attacks of terrorism, a nation will do things that do not stand up well at all by the judgment of history."

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