No one expected the Spanish inquisition

Devastating New York Times report tonight on the government officials who approved torture regime in the early 2000s and their ignorance that they were approving tactics that traced back to Communists in the Korean War, to the Spanish inquisition and one of the most brutal dictators of our time, Pol Pot:

According to several former top officials involved in the discussions seven years ago, they did not know that the military training program, called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, had been created decades earlier to give American pilots and soldiers a sample of the torture methods used by Communists in the Korean War, methods that had wrung false confessions from Americans.

Even George J. Tenet, the C.I.A. director who insisted that the agency had thoroughly researched its proposal and pressed it on other officials, did not examine the history of the most shocking method, the near-drowning technique known as waterboarding.

The top officials he briefed did not learn that waterboarding had been prosecuted by the United States in war-crimes trials after World War II and was a well-documented favorite of despotic governments since the Spanish Inquisition; one waterboard used under Pol Pot was even on display at the genocide museum in Cambodia.

Pol Pot? Really? Just try to defend this, although I'm sure that some will in the comments below.

The picture at top shows the waterboarding apparatus at the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Cambodia. The accompanying article notes:

Also preserved at Tuol Sleng are some of the instruments of torture used by the Khmer Rouge to obtain "confessions" from their prisoners.  Some prisoners were tied to a sloping wooden platform, a bit like a tilted bed. Hoods were placed over their heads and water poured over them to give the illusion of drowning (This practice is known as waterboarding.) Prisoners were also suspended upside down from a piece of outdoor gymnastics apparatus, then lowered head first into large pits of dirty water.

I wonder if some day our grandchildren will be able to visit a museum at Guantanamo. I wonder what they will see there.