We all, myself included, gave ourselves a pass a few years into the Bush administration by claiming “outrage fatigue.” Well, fatigue or no, it’s time to get outraged again.

Continuing revelations about Bush cabinet members — the highest level of unelected power-holders in this country — and Vice Pres. Dick Cheney ordering precise torture techniques on individual prisoners are too shocking to ignore. First we found that “The Principals,” as they are known, informed themselves on such methods so they could personally choose which ones would be inflicted. They just as deliberately kept the president slightly beyond their level of direct knowledge.

The officials also took care to insulate President Bush from a series of meetings where CIA interrogation methods, including waterboarding, which simulates drowning, were discussed and ultimately approved…

The meetings were held in the White House Situation Room…Attending the sessions were Cheney, then-Bush aides Attorney General John Ashcroft, Secretary of State Colin Powell, CIA Director George Tenet and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.

The eagerness on the part of these officials to learn about the methods and then to weigh the consequences of getting caught using them is shocking.

“No one at the agency wanted to operate under a notion of winks and nods and assumptions that everyone understood what was being talked about,” said a second former senior intelligence official. “People wanted to be assured that everything that was conducted was understood and approved by the folks in the chain of command.”

…At times, CIA officers would demonstrate some of the tactics, or at least detail how they worked, to make sure the small group of “principals” fully understood what the al-Qaida detainees would undergo. The principals eventually authorized physical abuse…

The small group then asked the Justice Department to examine whether using the interrogation methods would break domestic or international laws.

While his most trusted advisers selected which method to inflict on which detainee, Bush delivered the denials. In 2006, fellow PR editor Jon cited 16 instances when Bush, his press secretary, or one of The Principals stated flatly that they were not doing precisely what we now know they were doing. Here’s a sampling:

• October 17, 2006
  President Bush: As I’ve said before, the United States does not torture. It’s against our laws and it’s against our values.
• September 6, 2006
  President Bush: I want to be absolutely clear with our people, and the world: The United States does not torture.
• January 11, 2006
  Vice President Cheney: But the United States does not torture. That’s not our policy. It never has been.
• December 16, 2005
  Sec. of State Rice: I want to be very clear that the President has always told everyone that he will not allow torture, he will not condone torture, that it is U.S. policy to respect our international obligations.
• December 15, 2005
  Press Sec. Scott MacClellan: And the President has made it clear that we do not torture and he does not condone torture.
• December 15, 2005
  National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley: The President has made clear from the very beginning that the CIA — that anyone in this government is going to comply with law. That’s what the President said from the very beginning: We do not torture.
• December 5, 2005
  Sec. of State Rice: The United States does not permit, tolerate, or condone torture under any circumstances.

How did we miss that they are mainly saying it’s not “our policy” to torture? That’s different from not doing it.

Yes, I have outrage fatigue. Yes, I’m tired of these people. Yes, I am sick of being ashamed of my leaders. But pleading exhaustion and turning away is part of what got us here, according to columnist Leonard Pitts. Pitts was appalled by the recent release of the 2003 memo outlining torture techniques, written by then Justice Department lawyer John Yoo.

Much of the media coverage of the 81-page document has focused on the — and this word is unavoidably ironic — bloodless legalese in which Yoo contemplates the permissibility of putting a prisoner’s eyes out, slitting his tongue, scalding him with water, dosing him with mind-altering drugs, disfiguring him with acid. But what is also appalling is Yoo’s contention, repeatedly restated in the memo, that the president in time of war enjoys virtually unfettered authority over, is accountable to no one for, the treatment of prisoners…

Your humble correspondent doesn’t know from legal scholarship. He does know this: Seven years ago when the nation was attacked and Americans wanted to pitch in, wanted to help, wanted to sacrifice, our leaders told us to go shopping. Prop the economy up, they said. Don’t worry about the war. Let us handle it. Go shopping.

And we did. Nor, scared as we were, eager for the illusion of security as we were, did we look too closely or examine too intently the things that were being done in our names. We became, many of us, expert at ignoring the screams from behind the curtain, discounting the growing mountain of evidence that things were not as we had been told, brushing off nagging questions about what we have become and how that does not square with what we are supposed to be.

We shopped, and did not fret overmuch about the price of our moral laxity.

…seven years later, George W. Bush is still president of the United States, Donald Rumsfeld is working on his memoirs and John Yoo is a law professor at UC Berkeley.

And impeachment is still “off the table.” I for one am about ready to up-end that table and watch the rancid contents of those dishes go flying.