Here's the way it works, Doug:   George W. Bush will never be mistaken for an intellectual, but he isn't stupid. I doubt that he would be foolish enough to explicitly authorize torture. The word "torture" probably never came up during discussions of interrogations at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and elsewhere. At one point, Bush quite probably said something like "Do whatever you need to do." Either that, or he stood by silently when someone else said it. This way, he could always say that he did not authorize torture and that indeed he was horrified that people might interpret his instructions that way.

That's politics, Doug.

But here's where it's at:   "According to a March 2003 Pentagon memo, Bush administration lawyers issued legal justifications for torture, specifically claiming, 'President Bush was not bound by either an international treaty prohibiting torture or by a federal anti-torture law.' The revelations have now forced the President to backtrack from his previous denials of culpability, with the White House admitting for the first time that Bush did, in fact, 'set broad guidelines' for interrogation in Iraq—a tacit admission that Bush himself 'opened the door' to the torture tactics in the first place."

Perhaps Bush was not as politically savvy as my suppositions above assume he was. This would be more consistent with John Ashcroft's uncooperative and evasive behavior before the Senate committee.

Don Firth