Newly released U.S. government documents, detailing how Bush administration officials punched legalistic holes in the Geneva Convention’s protections of war captives, stand in stark contrast to the outrage some of the same officials expressed in the first week of the Iraq War when Iraqi TV interviewed several captured American soldiers.

John Yoo and some other Bush administration lawyers who built the legal framework for torture are now out of the U.S. government, but one still holds a Cabinet-level rank – Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff.

Tuesday’s highly anticipated Congressional testimony by General David Petraeus, the top military commander in Iraq, and Ryan Crocker the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, appeared to be an exercise in futility.

Mary Walker, the former Air Force general counsel, received an urgent memo http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/documents/011703haynes.pdf from the Pentagon's top attorney on Jan. 17, 2003.

At a Congressional committee hearing in February, Theresa Payton, the chief information officer at the White House Office of Administration, testified that White House emails sent and received between 2003 and 2005 fell into a virtual black hole when the Bush administration transitioned from Lotus Notes to the Microsoft Outlook email exchange—a system that apparently was incapable of copying and archiving emails from Lotus.

The Iraq war, which was predicated on the existence of weapons of mass destruction, has resulted in the deaths of nearly 4,000 US troops and has cost taxpayers roughly half-a-trillion dollars.

Last year, during the height of the Congressional investigation into the firings of US attorneys, David Iglesias and John McKay, two of the nine federal prosecutors who were ousted, revealed that they were pressured by Republicans to bring charges of vote fraud against people who intended to voter for Democrats in separate elections in New Mexico and Washington state several years ago.

An Army specialist who served two tours of duty in Iraq sued Defense Secretary Robert Gates and his supervising officer Wednesday for allegedly trying to force him to embrace fundamentalist Christianity and then retaliating against him when he refused.

David Iglesias, the former U.S. attorney for New Mexico who was one of nine US attorneys fired two years ago for reasons that appear to be politically motivated, said last week's vote in the House to hold former White House counsel Harriet Miers and President Bush's chief of staff, Josh Bolten, in contempt for refusing to testify and turn over documents to a congressional committee related to the US attorney dismissals was encouraging, but questions related to his dismissal remain unanswered.

John Yoo, the author of the infamous August 1, 2002 "torture memo" that formed the legal basis for so-called "enhanced" interrogation techniques against high-level terrorist detainees, used a statute governing health benefits when he provided the White House with a legal opinion defining torture, according to a former Justice Department official.