It's only natural that the sociopathic kid who blew up frogs would grow up to be the sociopathic President who tortured people. The Herald Trib:

The Central Intelligence Agency has acknowledged for the first time the existence of two classified documents, including one signed by President George W. Bush, that have guided the agency's interrogation and detention of terror suspects.

The CIA disclosed the existence of the documents in a letter Friday sent from the agency's associate general counsel, John McPherson, to lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union.

The contents of the documents were not revealed, but one document, as described by the ACLU, is "a directive signed by President Bush granting the CIA the authority to set up detention facilities outside the United States and outlining interrogation methods that may be used against detainees."

The second document, according to the group is a Justice Department legal analysis "specifying interrogation methods that the CIA may use against top Al Qaeda members."

Yes, those "detention facilities" would be the gulag holding 35,000 prisoners.

And those "interrogation methods" led to this:

[Abu Ghraib]

As the ACLU says:

"If President Bush and the Justice Department authorized the CIA to torture prisoners, the public has a right to know."

Indeed.

Of course, as I've been saying for some time, the real question is this: What's the chain of custody for the results of the torture sessions--in the form of photos, videos, transcripts--came to the West Wing. I'm betting they did. The systems administrators or the "young professionals" would be the ones to ask. Can't somebody please turn one?

NOTE How odd that this story came out November 15. And how odd that is story came out in a Times subsidiary, not in the Times itself.