The long overdue waterboarding of George W. Bush, Alberto Gonzales, and some named colleagues.

Time to get on with the job, if the latest New York Times report from Risen, Shane, and Johnston is anything to go by.

When the Justice Department publicly declared torture “abhorrent” in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations.

Until Gonzales. 

But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.

Until Comey couldn't stand it anymore.

Mr. Gonzales approved the legal memorandum on “combined effects” over the objections of James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general, who was leaving his job after bruising clashes with the White House. Disagreeing with what he viewed as the opinion’s overreaching legal reasoning, Mr. Comey told colleagues at the department that they would all be “ashamed” when the world eventually learned of it.

And we are ashamed.  And ready to do something about it.  If  (of course) a laggardly Congress responds...

Villains of the piece, aside from John Yoo (whose infamous torture memo was later overruled by Jack Goldsmith) but including just about everybody in Dick Cheney's office.  One of the worst has gone, but some of them are still around.

*Stephen Bradbury, "who since 2005 has headed the elite Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department. He has become a frequent public defender of the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance program and detention policies at Congressional hearings and press briefings, a role that some legal scholars say is at odds with the office’s tradition of avoiding political advocacy."

*Alberto Gonzales, who was put in there as an enforcer and who did the job in spite of the fact that he get to see his friend, George, as often as he liked.  [What the heck was that relationship, anyway?]

*The Supreme Court majority, which allows anything which doesn't "shock the conscience" -- which of course it doesn't as long as you (American citizen, voter, responsible human) know nothing about it.

That's right.  A sloshing pailful of scum that includes:   The president.  The attorney general.  Their  apostles political appointees. Four justices of the Supreme Court -- those guys over there wearing the black hats, standing tall in the saddle and said to be untouchable, stinking of self-righteousness and the morals of Judge Roy Bean.  And I guess we have to include that throwback Republican Congress which had so many jolly deals with lobbyists going on they really didn't have time to check out what was taking place over at Justice.