Extraordinary rendition is nothing new. It was used during the cold war as the US shifted communist insurgents from one Latin American country to another. For example, Salvadoran communists would be sent by the CIA to Honduras or Guatemala for interrogation and torture. Back then there was no Internet and CNN was in its infancy, so such occurrences, like most Cold War atrocities, went unknown.

The Bush administration did two things that allowed extraordinary rendition to take place. First, it classified all enemies captured during the war in Afghanistan as "unlawful combatants". By exploiting technicalities in the law governing the Geneva Convention the Bush administration made all prisoners of war "unlawful" meaning that their human rights would not be protected by the Geneva Convention.

This is how the Guantamo Bay prison (and later Abu Graib) came to be. To do this the Bush administration needed approval from Congress and the Supreme Court. The appointment of Alberto Gonzalez to the Supreme Court made it possible for such legal manouvering to take place.

Waterboarding is a really old torture technique going back to the Spanish Inquisition. The US developed a modern method during the Vietnam war. It was used as a torture and interrogation technique against the Vietcong. It was further refined through the 1980s in Latin America as political prisoners were interrogated to stop local Communist parties from suceeding in carrying out their revolutions. A good example was Chile where dictator Agusto Pinochet used it against civilians and suspected communists.

Waterboarding used to be illegal. In 1983 law enforcement personnel who used waterboarding were sentenced to 10 years in prison. After WWII Japanese soldiers were sent to prison for using waterboarding against American POWs.

The Bush administration lowered the classification of waterboarding and made it "benign". A torture technique that goes back for hundreds of years became acceptable.

The Bush administration got away with this by getting around the Geneva Convention and by convincing the American public that waterboarding is not torture and is an essential interrogation technique against terrorists.

Well, might is right. The people who held power during the Bush administration are above the law. Slobodan Milosevic was tried for crimes against humanity, and all he did is in essence the same that American troops have done in Iraq and Afghanistan. Milosevic tortured and killed islamic fundamentalists trying to break Serbia apart. If Milosevic had done so during the Iraq war, he would have been ignored just as the world ignored what the Russians did in Chechnya against separatist moslems, or what the Chinese did in Western China against their moslem minority.