Responding to the charge of being pro-torture, Commentary’s Abe Greenwald defends his support for the waterboard torture technique — which he calls “painless” — by insisting that “anything to which Christopher Hitchens is willing to submit himself in pursuit of a Vanity Fair article is not torture. This covers, among other things, back-waxing, exercise class, and waterboarding.”

Greenwald, of course, neglects to mention that Hitchens’ experience being waterboarded led Hitchens to conclude that “if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.”

When President Obama released the four of the Office of Legal Counsel’s (OLC) Bush-era torture memos last week, he issued a statement promising not to pursue torture prosecutions against CIA agents who relied on the memos to justify their use of torture tactics on terrorist suspects in U.S. custody. (Notably, Obama left open the possibility of prosecuting the torture architects.) “[I]t is our intention to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution,” Obama said.

But in an interview with the Austrian newspaper Der Standard, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Professor Manfred Nowak, explained that Obama’s grant of immunity is likely a violation of international law. As a party to the UN Convention Against Torture, the U.S. is obligated to investigate and prosecute U.S. citizens that are believed to have engaged in torture:

STANDARD: CIA torturers are according to U.S. President Obama not to be prosecuted. Is that decision supportable?

NOWAK: Absolutely not. The United States has, like all other Contracting Parties to the UN Convention Against Torture, committed itself to investigate instances of torture and to prosecute all cases in which credible evidence of torture is found.

Indeed, Article 2 of the convention on torture explains that “no exceptional circumstances whatsoever” can be used to legally justify torture. Further, the convention states that an “order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification of torture.”

Nowak explained that by invoking the OLC’s memos as justification for the actions of CIA agents against terrorist suspects in U.S. custody, Obama is acting contrary to U.S. obligations under the treaty:

STANDARD: In other words, by making this announcement, Obama has violated international law?

NOWAK: Correct. It is a violation of binding international treaty law in this case, because this is an international law convention — and it provides unequivocally that states are not merely obligated to make torture a crime, but also to prosecute any incidents of which credible evidence can be found.

In announcing his decision to release the OLC memos, Obama also suggested that he is not inclined to conduct a full investigation into the government’s use of torture. Nowak, however, said the he believes that such an investigation ought to be Obama’s highest priority. “Most importantly, there should be a comprehensive investigation undertaken by an independent body. Whether by a special investigatory commission created by Congress or by a special investigator — there are different approaches,” Nowak expalined.

Today on Fox News Sunday, former CIA director Michael Hayden blasted President Obama’s decision to release the Bush-era torture memos. Hayden claimed that he and other former CIA directors opposed making the documents public because it would compromise future interrogations of detainees by letting them know the “outer limits” of what the United States does:

HAYDEN: At the tactical level, what we have described for our enemies in the midst of a war are the outer limits that any American would ever go to in terms of interrogating an al Qaeda terrorist. That’s very valuable information. Now, it doesn’t mean we would always go to the outer limits, but it describes the box within which Americans will not go beyond. To me, that’s very useful for our enemies, even if as a policy matter, this President at this time had decided not to use one, any or all of those techniques. It reveals the outer limits. That’s very important.

Watch it:

The enhanced interrogation tactics were not “the outer limits”; they were in fact torture techniques that operated outside the law. In one of his earliest acts after taking office, Obama signed executive orders ending the CIA’s secret prisons and ending torture by requiring interrogations to abide by the Army Field Manual.

Since at least last month, Hayden has been pressing the Obama administration not to release these torture memos. But his attempts to cover-up abuses go back much further. He has tried repeatedly to prevent the public from learning about the Bush administration’s torture, pushing the “outer limits” of what’s legal:

– In 2005, the CIA destroyed videotapes of agents administering harsh interrogation tactics against two al Qaeda operatives. Hayden defended the move, saying, “What matters here is that it was done in line with the law.” Hayden also claimed that videotaping of interrogations had stopped in 2002, even though evidence later came out suggesting that taping had continued.

– In 2004, IG John L. Helgerson issued a report warning “that some C.I.A.-approved interrogation procedures appeared to constitute cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, as defined by the international Convention Against Torture.” He continued to exert aggressive oversight of the agency, and in 2007, Hayden ordered an unprecedented internal investigation of the IG. The move appeared to “undermine the independence of the office.”

Host Chris Wallace also asked Hayden about the revelation that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in March 2003, based on information released in the new torture memos. Hayden claimed that such information had not been made public and refused to confirm or deny the accounts.