The biggest shock is that the agressive torture rules Cheney and Bush wanted were shot down by then-Attorney Gen. John Ashcroft, who I would have otherwise expected to fall in lockstep. Good for him, if it’s true.

Reading between the lines, it appears Ashcroft was pushed out and replaced by Gonzales, who once wrote that terrorism had rendered the Geneva Convention rules on torture quaint:

When the [Ashcroft] Justice Department publicly declared torture “abhorrent” in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations.

But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.