As the first anniversary of 9/11 approached, and a prized Guantánamo detainee wouldn't talk, the Bush administration's highest-ranking lawyers argued for extreme interrogation techniques, circumventing international law, the Geneva Conventions, and the army's own Field Manual. The attorneys would even fly to Guantánamo to ratchet up the pressure--then blame abuses on the military. Philippe Sands follows the torture trail, and holds out the possibility of war-crimes charges.

This is from the actual article..

The Bush administration has always taken refuge behind a "trickle up" explanation: that is, the decision was generated by military commanders and interrogators on the ground. This explanation is false. The origins lie in actions taken at the very highest levels of the administration--by some of the most senior personal advisers to the president, the vice president, and the secretary of defense. At the heart of the matter stand several political appointees--lawyers--who, it can be argued, broke their ethical codes of conduct and took themselves into a zone of international criminality, where formal investigation is now a very real option.

Yoo's memo wasn't written until a year after the torture policy was implemented at Guantanamo. Here is the part that made me sick to my stomach..

November 2002 "action memo" written by William J. (Jim) Haynes II, the general counsel of the U.S. Department of Defense, to his boss, Donald Rumsfeld; the document is sometimes referred to as the Haynes Memo. Haynes recommended that Rumsfeld give "blanket approval" to 15 out of 18 proposed techniques of aggressive interrogation. Rumsfeld duly did so, on December 2, 2002, signing his name firmly next to the word "Approved." Under his signature he also scrawled a few words that refer to the length of time a detainee can be forced to stand during interrogation: "I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?"

While the Bush Administration was blaming the troops for "going overboard", they knew the torture was started, implemented and approved by people in their administration long before Abu Graib. In fact, it can be deduced that Abu Graib was simply a local implementation of interrogation instructions that went out to all the places holding captured Iraqis, and Al Quedas.

The rest of the article is interesting, a doctor who specializes in rehabilitation of torture victims discusses what is done and what effect it has. There is also more discussion on torture and why we do it. It's not the troops, it's the Justice Department and the Defense Department, with authorization from the highest level.