While you were voting, phone banking, mastering delegate math or dodging a killer tornado in the Midwest, the Bush administration was busy finally admitting to and condoning torture.

CIA Director Michael Hayden chose stormy distracting Super Tuesday to concede for the record that the CIA used waterboarding to extract information from three Al Qaeda suspects. “In the most detailed public comments on a CIA program that had been shrouded in secrecy for years, Hayden said the agency had used simulated drowning to extract crucial information from terrorism suspects in 2002 and 2003,” reported The Los Angeles Times.

A day later, as campaign pundits tracked the delegate count, the Bush administration announced that waterboarding, which has been the subject of attorney general hearings and presidential debates, has been made legal. The L.A. Times quoted White House spokesman Tony Fratto saying waterboarding is legal and could be used “under certain circumstances.”

The Bush Administration and the Bush-era Justice Department have for years denied using torture and have hedged repeatedly on whether the CIA was given the green light to waterboard prisoners. During his confirmation hearing as Attorney General of the United States in November, five years into the War on Terror, Michael Mukasey said he couldn’t comment on waterboarding because he “didn’t know what was involved in the technique.” A citizen website went up in response to detail the technique for the Attorney General. It includes this description based on witness testimony and historical records:

Waterboarding induces panic and suffering by forcing a person to inhale water into the sinuses, pharynx, larynx, trachea, and lungs. The head is tilted back and water is poured into the upturned mouth or nose. Eventually the subject cannot exhale more air or cough out more water, the lungs are collapsed, and the sinuses and trachea are filled with water. The subject is drowned from the inside, filling with water from the head down. The chest and lungs are kept higher than the head so that coughing draws water up and into the lungs while avoiding total suffocation.

As John McCain said: “Anyone who knows what waterboarding is could not be unsure. It is a horrible torture technique used by Pol Pot and being used on Burmese Buddhist monks as we speak.”

The Washington Post has a great editorial on the debate on Friday, saying: “Waterboarding is, and always has been, torture…Congress must act now to put an end to the continued twisting of the law and fundamental American values. Lawmakers can do so by passing legislation requiring all U.S. interrogators to abide by the techniques authorized in the Army Field Manual, which military officials have said allows them the flexibility they need to gather intelligence.”

CIA Director Hayden, however, held that the CIA should not be constrained by the guidelines of the Army Field Manual. He said The CIA is not the Army, that agents follow a different dress and grooming code and that they should also be allowed to waterboard if they believe the situation calls for it. McCain and other military personnel have been horrified by such cavalier attitudes toward torture under the Bush Administration. They argue that such policy only turns back on the country in general and on U.S. soldiers in particular, undermining American standing around the world and bringing torture upon American POWs. “When I was imprisoned,” said McCain of his time as a POW in North Vietnam, “I took heart from the fact that I knew my North Vietnamese captors would never be treated by Americans the way I was being treated by them… There are much better and more effective ways to get information. You torture someone long enough, he’ll tell you whatever he thinks you want to know.”

I almost inserted an argument here about how this country needs to work on its international public diplomacy now more than ever, and that torturing foreigners ain’t the way to do it. But I’m not going to finish that thought. I shouldn’t have to. There is one reason and one reason alone that the United States should not torture people: it’s wrong.