Thanks to the unsung but heroic journalism of McClatchy's Jonathan Landay, we now know who is to blame for the Bush System of Torture - the Neocons who worked for Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.

"Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people were told repeatedly, by CIA . . . and by others, that there wasn't any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam, and that no such ties were likely because the two were fundamentally enemies, not allies."

Senior administration officials, however, "blew that off and kept insisting that we'd overlooked something, that the interrogators weren't pushing hard enough, that there had to be something more we could do to get that information," he said.

David Swanson has a full list, all of whom deserve a Citizens' Arrest for war crimes when they appear in public. (The Most Wanted cards are useful for this purpose.) Most of them belonged to the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) and/or were represented by the p/r firm Benador Associates, which seems to have vanished.

The Neocons who worked directly for Cheney included Scooter Libby, David Addington, John Hannah, and Cathie Martin. Those under Rumsfeld included Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, Stephen Cambone, William Haynes, John Bolton, and David Wurmser. But there were many more Neocons in other key positions, including Elliott Abrams (National Security Council) and Richard Perle.

They relied on authorizing memos drafted by scheming lawyers like John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzales, John Yoo, Jay Bybee, Steven Bradbury, and John Rizzo. The evil work of all these lawyers was directed by David Addington.

Of course George Bush was The Decider who had to sign the ultimate authorizations to nullify the Geneva Conventions and thereby legalize war crimes.

President George W. Bush made a written determination that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which would have afforded minimum standards for humane treatment, did not apply to al Qaeda or Taliban detainees. This act, the [Senate Armed Services] committee found, cleared the way for a new interrogation program to be developed in-part based on “Chinese communist” tactics used against Americans during the Korean War, mainly to elicit false confessions for propaganda purposes.

The actual torture was directed by George Tenet, whose infamous "slam-dunk" remark about Iraq's WMD's now has a double meaning: head-slamming and head-dunking. His henchment were:

former director Michael Hayden; the agency’s no. 2, Stephen Kappes; Michael Sulick, the director of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service; and let’s not forget John O. Brennan, former CIA Director George Tenet’s deputy, now an Obama advisor in the White House

The whole War on Terror enterprise, including torture and the insane invasion of Iraq, was masterminded by the White House Iraq Group (WHIG), led by founder Andy Card and chair Karl Rove. The other key members were: Karen Hughes, James Wilkinson, Mary Matalin, Nick Calio, Stephen Hadley, Condi Rice, and Ari Fleischer. The invisible powers behind the scenes were Henry Kissinger (who met regularly with Cheney), his partner Paul Bremer (who was chosen by the Neocons to destroy Iraq), oil superlawyer James Baker, weapons supercontractor Frank Carlucci, and media superbaron Rupert Murdoch.

And they worked with a powerful Neocon network inside the Corporate Media, including Bill Kristol, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, Charles Krauthammer, and Fred Barnes (FOX, Weekly Standard, National Review, Washington Post), Judith Miller and Michael Gordon (NY Times), the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, and Joe Scarborough, Pat Buchanan, and Col. Jack Jacobs (MSNBC).

One pundit who deserves special infamy is William Safire of the NY Times, who did more than anyone else to create the myth of the Prague Conspiracy between Al Qaeda and Iraq, based entirely on the lunatic fantasies of Laurie Mylroie, Meyrav Wurmser, Frank Gaffney and Michael Ledeen.