Charles And Gregory Fried: Because It Is Wrong

After Sept. 11th, the U.S. government felt that it urgently needed information in order to protect the country — intelligence that could ward off future attacks was the highest priority — and the George W. Bush White House went to great lengths to acquire it.

The exact extent to which the Bush administration acted in the pursuit information is still coming to light. The basics have been known for a long time: prisoner interrogation methods were ratcheted-up to a degree that have been called torture, and the National Security Agency was secretly granted the ability to spy on U.S. citizens without the approval of the courts.

Both of these tactics — and the laws that were bent or broken to enable them — are the focus of a new book by a father-son professorial duo, called "Because It Is Wrong: Torture, Privacy and Presidential Power in the Age of Terror."

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