The Washington Post has copies of two secret memos in which the Bush Administration officially endorsed waterboarding. What forced the Administration to go on-record? The CIA wanted cover:

The repeated requests for a paper trail reflected growing worries within the CIA that the administration might later distance itself from key decisions about the handling of captured al-Qaeda leaders, former intelligence officials said. The concerns grew more pronounced after the revelations of mistreatment of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and further still as tensions grew between the administration and its intelligence advisers over the conduct of the Iraq war.

Prosecution, alas, remains an open question.

Via the Daily Beast.