The Obama administration is now saying the same thing.

Today, it assured reporters in a background briefing with administration officials that although the U.S. government will continue to send terror suspects to foreign countries for interrogation — what has notoriously become known as “rendition” — it will seek assurances from those countries that their interrogators won’t torture the suspects.

Of course, the Bush administration said it sought and received those same assurances. After all, it’s long been illegal, both under U.S. and international law, to send detainees to countries where they’re likely to be tortured. So what’s different now?

“The State Department will play a larger role to ensure that those assurances are credible,” said one senior administration official during the background briefing. (Why the briefing was on background and not for attribution to particular administration officials isn’t clear.)

So, asked Eli Lake of The Washington Times, will the United States simply stop sending suspects to countries that are known to torture suspects, such as Egypt or Syria?

No, the administration is not willing to go that far, a senior administration official said.  However, “we will ensure that we have the appropriate assurances in place that gives us strong confidence that the individuals in question will not be tortured.”

The Obama administration is now saying that, unlike the Bush administration before it, it will seek to verify that suspects aren’t being tortured. According to a paper released by the Justice Department today, the task force recommended that “agencies obtaining assurances from foreign countries insist on a monitoring mechanism, or otherwise establish a monitoring mechanism, to ensure consistent, private access to the individual who has been transferred, with minimal advance notice to the detaining government.”

That sounds like an improvement, though having to provide any advance notice to the detaining government is problematic. The policy still, to some extent, allows the U.S. government to trust foreign officials who promise they won’t torture a terror suspect, even if they are officials of a country that is known by the United States to torture terror suspects.

The State Department may play a larger role than it did before, but the new interagency process is ultimately under the control of the president’s National Security Council. That’s better then keeping it a purely CIA function, as it was before. But it still raises the question of why the United States plans to send terror suspects to foreign countries known to torture them, and just how vigorous — and how long-lasting — U.S. monitoring will really be.

But the President’s speech seemed primarily aimed at stopping torture abroad, which is presumably why he’s called on the State Department to get involved. But what about torture committed by our own government?

I know some are still debating which techniques constitute “torture” — such as in this scolding piece from The Washington Times — but because the Convention Against Torture, which the president was commemorating, prohibits torture AND cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, as I’ve noted before, at this point we can put that debate aside. There’s little question that the sort of techniques engaged in by U.S. government officials — whether partial drowning, “walling,” weeks of sleep and food deprivation or locking detainees inside a tiny box with what were believed to be deadly insects is, at the very least, cruel and degrading.

It’s odd, therefore, as Marcy points out, to see the president — who vowed on his third day in office to end torture — refusing to prosecute those who engaged in acts that clearly violate the anti-torture convention he commemorated on Friday.

As Marcy put it: “Mr. President, the agency that must take the lead in stopping torture is the Department of Justice. The effective policies for stopping torture you’re looking for? They start with prosecuting torture.”

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Mr. Obama’s revelation of his “inner Muslim” in Cairo reveals much about who he is. He is our first president without an instinctive appreciation of the culture, history, tradition, common law and literature whence America sprang. The genetic imprint writ large in his 43 predecessors is missing from the Obama DNA … Kenya simply routed Kansas.

The president only had 42 white predecessors, not 43 — Grover Cleveland served twice — but you don’t worry about such things when you’re trying to expose the grave Kenyan threat to our culture.

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From the video, after Picket asks Ayers a few times about what the president thinks of his new book:

WASHINGTON TIMES: I’m just curious whether or not your publisher has sent a copy to President Obama.

AYERS: Have you gotten any feedback on your writings from the president? (Laughter)

WASHINGTON TIMES: Considering you may have had a collaboration with “Dreams of (sic) My Father.”

AYERS: I never had a collaboration. No.

WASHINGTON TIMES: No?

AYERS: That’s a myth.

The idea that Ayers wrote Obama’s first memoir was popularized by conservative author Jack Cashill on the conspiracy site WorldNetDaily, one of the hubs of the discredited theory that Obama was not born in Hawaii. Cashill’s investigation is a funny read, full of “proof” like Obama’s use of a nautical metaphor and asides such “in Obama, alas, Ayers may have found a much more lethal weapon to use against the ‘marauding monster’ called America than any pipe bomb he could have ever built.” The most traction this has gotten in the mainstream conservative press was an October blog post by National Review contributer Andy McCarthy, in which he credited Cashill for raising “significant questions about whether Obama is the rara avis he’s portrayed to be.”

For The Washington Times, these are still “significant questions.”

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We used figures for overall “approval” ratings for former President George W. Bush – 62 percent – and compared them to the ratings of “excellent” or “good” for Mr. Obama, which combined were 56 percent. However, when asked the same question – approve or disapprove – for Mr. Obama for the same three days of his first term, April 20-22, his rating actually was 65 percent, thus putting him above rather than below Mr. Bush.

It’s a nice gesture, but The Times still got a Drudge link and a media meme out of the deal.

The only new president less popular was Bill Clinton, who got off to a notoriously bad start after trying to force homosexuals on the military and a federal raid in Waco, Texas, that killed 86. Mr. Obama’s current approval rating of 56 percent is only one tick higher than the 55-percent approval Mr. Clinton had during those crises.

But that’s not what Gallup says.

Its April 24 poll has 56 percent saying the president is doing an “excellent or good job,” which is different than the generic approval number they used for previous presidents. Gallup’s separate current approval number for Obama is 65 percent. And The Times mysteriously lists the early events of the Clinton presidency while leaving out the huge poll boost Reagan got after surviving a March 30, 1981 assassination attempt. Reagan’s Gallup approval rating before the attack was only 59 percent, which the firm reported as historically low; at the 100 day mark, it was 67 percent. The Times doesn’t do any favors to its great reporters like Eli Lake by publishing this garbage.

But civil rights lawyers who’ve read Obama’s orders think the concerns are overblown, and the plain language of the executive orders Obama issued in the first 48 hours of his presidency suggest just the opposite.

“The reality is we don’t know what he’s doing or what he plans to do in this area other than he set up a study team to make recommendations on whether and how a rendition program would continue,” Chris Anders, legislative counsel for the ACLU in Washington, told me earlier today.

“People are reading into the provision that it does not take away short-term detention authority from the CIA,” Anders said. “That could be meant to protect a variety of different things. Rendition would only be one of them. But if you look through the executive orders, there are a number of places where President Obama kind of kicked the can down the road in terms of making decisions or putting them off.”

It was, after all, only his second day in office when he issued those orders.

As I’ve reported before, Obama’s orders were important first steps and in some cases largely symbolic moves; most still require the new administration to take many more specific actions down the road — in terms of closing Guantanamo, prosecuting suspected terrorists, and concealing information about government operations that President Bush had deemed state secrets.

“It may very well be that the administration does not yet know enough about either what the CIA has done and can do, or what they want it to do and not to do,” Anders said. “They know they want to shut down the secret prison program, so they did that. But they may have been concerned that they didn’t know enough yet to deal with other kinds of detention the CIA has.”

That doesn’t mean the order leaves open the CIA’s ability to return to torturing people, or to so-called “extraordinary rendition” — the Bush administration’s way of outsourcing torture by sending suspects to other countries that would likely interrogate them under torture. In fact, Obama has specifically committed to abide by the United Nations Convention Against Torture, which specifically forbids extraordinary rendition.

Even Tom Malinowski, the Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch, has adopted a similar “wait and see” attitude, favoring to take the new president at his word.

“What I heard loud and clear from the president’s order was that they want to design a system that doesn’t result in people being sent to foreign dungeons to be tortured,” Malinowski told The Los Angeles Times.

As Scott Horton put it in his blog today, “The LA Times just got punked.” Horton attributes the rash of reporting that Obama plans to continue the Bush rendition policies — complete with prisoner abuse and torture — to leaks from disgruntled CIA officials and to the right-wing media. The Washington Times, for example, last week reported that Obama’s executive orders leave open the possibility for the CIA to keep operating its “black sites.”

“The provision illustrates that the president’s order to shutter foreign-based prisons, known as black sites, is not airtight and that the Central Intelligence Agency still has options if it wants to hold terrorist suspects for several days at a time,” wrote The Washington Times’ Eli Lake in his “exclusive” reading of the president’s orders.

My own view is that if you parse every sentence of every order and memorandum issued by the president, you’re going to pretty easily find something that he did not address. Whether you want to label that a deliberate and dangerous “loophole” — or merely a cautious approach that allows further study of a difficult problem — seems to depend on which side of the aisle you’re sitting on.