The White House is about to get hit by the biggest tsunami since the Iran-Contra affair, maybe since Watergate. President George W. Bush is trapped inside the compound, immobilized by his own stay-the-course campaign strategy. Can he escape the massive tidal waves? Maybe. But at this point, it's not clear how.

The gist is that last year, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld put in place a secret operation that, in Hersh's words, "encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq."

This operation stemmed from an earlier supersecret program involving interrogation of suspected al-Qaida and Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. A memo to President Bush from White House counsel Alberto Gonzales--excerpted in Newsweek--rationalized the program by noting that we need "to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists and their sponsors in order to avoid further atrocities against American citizens." This new sort of war, he went on, renders the Geneva Conventions' limitations on interrogating enemy prisoners "obsolete" and "quaint."

This program, Hersh reports, was approved by the CIA, the National Security Agency, and the National Security Council. President Bush was "informed" of it. Hersh also notes that its harsh techniques yielded results; terrorists were rounded up as a result. So, last spring, after Saddam's regime fell in Iraq and Rumsfeld grew frustrated over the failure to find weapons of mass destruction or to learn anything about the insurgents who continued to resist the U.S.-led occupation, he put the same program in motion in Iraq.

That's when all hell broke loose, and conventional prisoners of war--whose wardens had up to that point been following Geneva rules--were suddenly treated like terrorists whose deadly secrets must immediately be squeezed out. Hence, the ensuing torture.

... Bush knew about it. Rumsfeld ordered it. His undersecretary of defense for intelligence, Steven Cambone, administered it. Cambone's deputy, Lt. Gen. William Boykin, instructed Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who had been executing the program involving al-Qaida suspects at Guant?namo, to go do the same at Abu Ghraib. Miller told Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who was in charge of the 800th Military Brigade, that the prison would now be dedicated to gathering intelligence. Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy, also seems to have had a hand in this sequence, as did William Haynes, the Pentagon's general counsel. Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, learned about the improper interrogations--from the International Committee of the Red Cross, if not from anyone else--but said or did nothing about it for two months, until it was clear that photographs were coming out.

All of these hound-hunts will be fueled by the extraordinary levels of internecine feuding that have marked this administration for years. Until recently, Rumsfeld, with White House assistance, has quelled dissenters, but the already-rattling lid is almost certain to blow off soon. As has been noted, Secretary of State Colin Powell, tiring of his good-soldier routine, is attacking his adversaries in the White House and Pentagon with eyebrow-raising openness. Hersh's story states that Rumsfeld's secret operation stemmed from his "longstanding desire to wrest control of America's clandestine and paramilitary operations from the CIA." Hersh's sources -- many of them identified as intelligence officials -- seem to be spilling, in part, to wrest back control. Uniformed military officers, who have long disliked Rumsfeld and his E-Ring crew for a lot of reasons, are also speaking out. Hersh and Newsweek both report that senior officers from the Judge Advocate General's Corps went berserk when they found out about Rumsfeld's secret operation, to the point of taking their concerns to the New York Bar Association's committee on international human rights.

The knives are out all over Washington -- lots of knives, unsheathed and sharpened in many different backroom parlors, for many motives and many throats. In short, this story is not going away.

The torture at Al Ghraib is a direct reflection of George W. Bush's moral character, his political beliefs and his military abilities.

Those images streaming out of Iraq reflect the true face of George W. Bush. Until he resigns or is removed from office, there is no way to begin removing the stain on the American character.

This is not about Donald Rumsfeld or a few "bad" soldiers in the field. Nor is it merely about "softening up" detainees to extract information about terrorism.

At their core, these outrages are gratuitous and psychotic. They stem directly from the morals and character of the man now occupying the Oval Office.