. . . The issue of torture is more complicated than it seems. America brought untold shame on itself with the abuses at Abu Ghraib. It's likely that the take-the-gloves-off attitude of Cheney and his allies filtered down through the ranks, until untrained prison guards with sadistic tendencies were making sport with electric shock. But no direct link has been reported. Waterboarding—simulating drowning by pouring water over the suspect's mouth and nostrils—is a brutal interrogation method. But by some (disputed) accounts, it was CIA waterboarding that got Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to talk. It is a liberal shibboleth that torture doesn't work—that suspects will say anything, including lies, to stop the pain. But the reality is perhaps less clear.

Last summer, the U.S. Senate (with Obama absent) voted to require the CIA to use no interrogation methods other than those permitted in the Army Field Manual. These are extremely restrictive: strictly speaking, the interrogator cannot ever threaten bodily harm or even put a prisoner on cold rations until he talks. Bush vetoed this measure, not unwisely.

Since then, President Obama signed three executive orders that were decidedly a rejection of "what Dick did," including the imposition of the Army Field Guideline on interrogation upon the CIA, as Jack Balkin describes:

In the first executive order (reproduced below) President Obama gets rid of every secret Bush Office of Legal Counsel opinion authorizing torture and cruel treatment and requires full compliance with Geneva Common Article 3. Moreover, as I read this executive order the Army Field Manual governs all interrogations (including CIA interrogations). Just as important, any new parts of the Army Field Manual must also comply with Common Article 3, meaning that no new techniques involving torture or cruel and inhumane treatment can be placed in a secret appendix to the Army Field Manual. Many people have been worried about this possibility, but unless President Obama issues a new executive order altering the present one, Common Article 3's ban on torture and cruel treatment still applies.

The order also requires closure of CIA detention facilities, including its secret "black sites" and requires access to and identification of detainees to the Red Cross. Read in conjunction with the third executive order closing the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, the government will now have to decide what to do with these prisoners-- whether to release them, try them in the criminal process, try them by traditional courts martial, or create a new set of procedures to try them (that is because, according to the third executive order reprinted below, the Administration is not going to use the military tribunals created by the Military Commissions Act of 2006).

Finally, the order creates a new task force on interrogation and transfer procedures to ensure that the United States does not engage in extraordinary rendition of detainees to countries where they will be tortured or abused. The task force will also review the existing interrogation and detention techniques in the army field manual to see which ones work and which do not.

All in all, it's a pretty thorough repudiation of the last eight years.

(Emphasis supplied.) It was also a pretty thorough repudiation of Stuart Taylor. Taylor pretends otherwise, acting as if he did not write his Newsweek article:

• While declaring waterboarding to be torture and renouncing use of such brutal interrogation methods, Obama and Holder have strongly implied that they have no use for the Left's lust to prosecute as "war criminals" Bush, Dick Cheney, or the many other high-level officials who approved waterboarding and other brutal methods in reliance on Justice Department advice that they were legal.

There's no doubt that these harsh methods, symbolized by Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, and Bush's bravado have badly stained America's image in much of the world. So it's nice to see the Washington Post Foreign Service reporting that Obama's election has made it "cool to be an American again."

It's interesting that Taylor feels Holder is with him on the war crimes question. It seems to me he should be out there denouncing Republican Senators who have put a hold on Holder's nomination precisely because they are not sure that Holder is ready to whitewash the Bush Administration's war crimes.

Taylor is even funnier in his revisionism on warrantless wiretapping:

• Holder made it clear in his confirmation testimony that the real problem with Bush's warrantless wiretapping program was not any unjustifiable invasion of privacy, as extreme civil libertarians have long maintained. Rather, the real problem was that for years Bush secretly defied the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act based on the dubious theory that Congress could not limit his powers, when he should and could instead have persuaded Congress to amend FISA. Bush and Congress finally did that last year, with Obama's support.

(Emphasis supplied.) I do not know who are these "extreme libertarians" Taylor is talking about, but as someone who wrote about these issues for many years, I am familiar with the Left blog arguments on it (at least those formulated by folks like me and Glenn Greenwald) -- and it was precisely that the warrantless wiretapping programs violated FISA, not that they necessarily violated the Fourth Amendment. Here is a representative post - Does War Make Presidents Kings?. People like Stuart Taylor and his ally Cass Sunstein defended the Bush Administration's violations of the FISA law at the time (and as recently as a month ago.) there was no battle over the Fourth Amendment at the time. It was about Article II and "inherent powers." Taylor advocated for the extreme position that a President is a king when it comes to Commander in Chief powers.

To President Obama's credit, he has defined what he does as "the Middle." It is for this reason that Taylor unwrite his pathetic defenses of Bush/Cheneyism.:

I worried in a pre-election column that Obama's down-the-line liberal voting record and associations with some extremists did not give a centrist like me much confidence that he would "resist pressure from Democratic interest groups, ideologues, and congressional leaders to steer hard to the left."

But since then he has done much to fulfill the hope expressed in that same column that he might prove to be "the pragmatic, consensus-building, inspirational Obama who has been on display during the general election campaign."

. . . I hope to see Obama marginalize the likes of both talk radio's Rush Limbaugh, who recently said, "I hope he fails," and MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, who recently implied that Obama will have failed unless he hounds ex-President Bush and his national security team with criminal prosecutions for their brutal interrogation methods.

To be sure, the Obama administration will bring some policies, and some judicial nominees, that a centrist such as me won't like . . . Consider, for example, the balance struck by Obama and his Attorney General-designate Eric Holder on the need to remain vigilant against terrorism while undoing Bush-Cheney claims of virtually unlimited presidential power to override civil liberties.

On this front, it was impolitic of me to suggest in my December 6 column that to avoid dismantling essential defenses against terrorism, Obama should "kick the hard Left gently in the teeth." That upset some bloggers.

I should have said "gently in the shins." And I am glad to report that Obama and Holder have been kicking away . . .

Taylor has chosen to put on the hat of the fool. Of course the person who got marginalized and "kicked in the shins" here was him and his fellow Beltway torture and abuse proponents.

From the week after the election, I have been among those skeptical and vigilant about Obama on these issues. (Remember John Brennan anyone?) But the fact is President Obama has answered every call so far on these issues. In effect, he has marginalized Stuart Taylor, Jr. and in reality, Cass Sunstein (by keeping Sunstein out of the Justice Department.) By elevating folks like Dawn Johnsen and Marty Lederman in Justice, Obama has marginalized the Taylor-like thinking on Bush-Cheneyism.

My skepticism has proven unfounded on these issues so far. Obama has been just about all we could ask for. But more than that, if he has Stuart Taylor, Jr. running for the hills, claiming that he is well pleased when Obama does exactly the opposite of what he insisted upon just 2 weeks ago, then I must say Obama has won the political battle of defining the middle on this issue as well.

Taylor has been reduced to drawing the line on criminal prosecutions for war crimes. (Before he opposed any investigations whatsoever.) He cheers that Obama has "strongly implied" he will not "support" such criminal investigations. Perhaps he will not. But Taylor is reduced to leaning on this thin reed to claim "victory."

I will give Taylor this "victory," as long as our side wins on the policy. And so far, when it comes to civil liberties and the torture issue, we have.

Speaking for me only