Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) of the Senate Intelligence committee has just released a declassified narrative (pdf) of the OLC's development of its opinions on torture.

The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder has already picked out a key excerpt, that sheds some light on just who in the Bush administration helped devise and approve the torture policies:

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As we noted, Philip Zelikow, a former top lawyer to Condi Rice at the State Department, yesterday wrote that the White House tried to destroy all copies of a memo he authored, which took issue with the legal opinions laid out in the infamous OLC torture memos.

Today, Zelikow appeared on MSNBC to flesh out that story. Among other things, he reveals that the Bushies said his memo was "inconvenient to have around." (Would it have been too much for Andrea Mitchell to have followed up by asking him who, exactly, said that?)

Watch:

As David noted over at TPM, there was some potentially big news in a blog post that was written this morning over at Foreign Policy by Philip Zelikow, a top State Department lawyer under Condoleezza Rice.

Zelikow wrote that, in 2005, he had written a memo on the legality of harsh interrogation techniques that expressed an "alternative view" to the OLC memos. He continued:

My colleagues were entitled to ignore my views. They did more than that: The White House attempted to collect and destroy all copies of my memo. I expect that one or two are still at least in the State Department's archives.

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Two memos sent by the White House authorizing the use of torture in CIA interrogations firmly tie the Bush administration to the controversial techniques used on detainees and investigated by the Justice Department, the Washington Post reports.

The White House's written approval of the CIA interrogation methods were provided at the request of then CIA Director George Tenet, who was seeking "top cover," should the administration try to distance itself from the decisions later.

One memo, provided in 2003 approved the methods later used in prisons like Abu Ghraib. When the scandal over that prison erupted, Tenet requested a second letter from the White House which was provided in July 2004.

The memos are the latest in recent admissions from the Bush administration on their role in authorizing and shaping CIA interrogation techniques -- charges they denied for years. In late September, Condoleezza Rice admitted White House officials discussed using torture against detainees.

From the Washington Post:

Tenet first pressed the White House for written approval in June 2003, during a meeting with members of the National Security Council, including Rice, the officials said. Days later, he got what he wanted: a brief memo conveying the administration's approval for the CIA's interrogation methods, the officials said.

Administration officials confirmed the existence of the memos, but neither they nor former intelligence officers would describe their contents in detail because they remain classified. The sources all spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not cleared to discuss the events.

The second request from Tenet, in June 2004, reflected growing worries among agency officials who had just witnessed the public outcry over the Abu Ghraib scandal. Officials who held senior posts at the time also spoke of deteriorating relations between the CIA and the White House over the war in Iraq -- a rift that prompted some to believe that the agency needed even more explicit proof of the administration's support.

In a big admission from the Bush White House, Condoleezza Rice has admitted to Senate investigators that senior administration officials met repeatedly between 2002 and 2003 to discuss the CIA's use of harsh interrogation methods on detainees.

In written statements to Senate investigators looking into the use of torture against detainees, Rice gives new details about administration members who were involved, and their consideration of a military training program, SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape) to be used in interrogation.

From the L.A. Times:

In particular, Rice wrote in the Sept. 12 statement that officials discussed simulated torture techniques that elite U.S. soldiers were subjected to as part of a survival training program, and that she and other officials were told that such methods "had been deemed not to cause significant physical or psychological harm."

Rice, who was serving as national security advisor at the time of the discussions, did not identify the source of that assertion. She was referring to a U.S. military program known as Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, or SERE, which at times has included waterboarding and other controversial methods subsequently employed by the CIA.

. . . Rice did not disclose who at the meetings, but said that she had "asked Atty. Gen. [John] Ashcroft personally to review and confirm the legal advice" being prepared by the Department of Justice on the CIA's interrogation plans.

Other senior officials who routinely attended so-called principals meetings included then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld; Alberto R. Gonzales, then the presidential counsel; and David S. Addington, the vice president's counsel.

In a speech yesterday to the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee in Washington, Condoleezza Rice did a little saber-rattling on Iran, in a tone the New York Times described as "unusually sharp":

"We would be willing to meet with them but not while they continue to inch toward nuclear weapons under the cover of talks," she told the group, a pro-Israel lobby known by its acronym, Aipac. "The real question isn't why won't the Bush administration talk to Iran. The real question is why won't Iran talk to us."

How much do Rice's comments reflect President Bush's views? It's long been known that few senior officials have the ear of the President like his secretary of state and former national security adviser. But former presidential press secretary Scott McClellan put a finer point on it in little noticed but exceptional criticisms of Rice in his new memoir, What Happened, published this week:

My later experiences with Condi led me to believe she was more interested in figuring out where the president stood and just carrying out his wishes while expending only cursory effort in helping him understand all the considerations and potential consequences.

McClellan marveled at her ability to remain at the center of the Iraq-policy decision makers since the administration's earliest days, yet rarely receive much criticism about the handling of the war.

Over time, however, I was stuck by how deft she is at protecting her reputation. No matter what went wrong, she was somehow able to keep her hands clean, even when the problems related to matters under her direct purview, including the WMD rationale for war in Iraq, the decision to invade Iraq, the sixteen words in the State of the Union address, and postwar planning and implementation of the strategy in Iraq.

Although she had been the presidents top foreign policy advisor and coordinator of his national security team, she has largely allowed responsibility for all these matters to fall on people like former CIA Director George Tenant, Paul Bremer and Don Rumsfeld.

But it was her relationship with the President that was the controlling influence on her own decision-making, McClellan asserts:

In private she complimented and reinforced Bush's instincts rather than challenging and questioning them. As far as I could tell from internal meeting and discussions, Condi invariably fell in line with the president's thinking.

As a result, McClellan suggests historians may not be kind to Rice.

If, as president Bush likes to say, results really do matter, then history will likely judge her harshly as the person responsible for overseeing a number of the defining -- and, at least in the short term, ill-fated -- policies of the Bush administration.