Well, based on the President's semi-public admonishment of Rumsfeld last month as well as Rumsfeld's own testimony, it appears that the White House was NOT informed. But the real issue is not who was informed, but who was responsible. Commanders are specifically charged by the Army with developing "disciplined and cohesive units sustained at the highest readiness level possible" and for "properly training their soldiers and ensuring that both soldiers and equipment are in the proper state of readiness." Those soldiers weren't trained, they weren't ready, and they weren't disciplined. There is a commander who needs to (figuratively) hang for dereliction of duty.
Now you could make a case for it being someone in the Pentagon or White House if our whole military was untrained and undisciplined, but most of the units in the Army and other services are trained, disciplined, and ready. So the problem is somewhere further down the line.
The enlisted men were just the ones carrying out the orders passed down to them!
Well, they're not robots who just do what they're told without thinking or exercising some judgment. The "I was just following orders" excuse doesn't cut it if the orders are obviously wrong.
They leave that determination to men who are senior to themselves by a couple of stripes. E-3's rely on the judgement of E-5's for legality, the same as E-5's rely on the judgement of E-7 and 8's for legality, and so on.
I have the hardest time imagining that the Officers in charge of interrogation are not aware of previous methods used by both our Allies and the enemy in extracting INTEL from prisoners.
They would know which methods work best under which circumstances with what type of prisoner, age, rank, religion, wounded, etc., and they would know which was legal and which was illegal.
They would be the ones to order which methods to use and which to not use because of their training and experience. If humiliation and threat of injury weren't considered effective they would have ordered that those methods not be used.
I know that at the end of each work day men sit around and talk about their accomplishments and failures. If I could brag to another MI or my superior officer about how effective placing womens underwear on a prisoners head was for gathering INTEL, you can bet I would.
Unless my superior said, "Whoa, back up. That's illegal. I don't want to hear anymore about it and I never want you to use that method again! Understood?", then I would continue to use that method.
Daily communication in the military is not done with paperwork, the men talk to each to each other. The interrogation methods being applied every day were certainly shared by the men in the unit.
I can see the possibility of showing a prisoner a picture of another prisoner who has womens panties on his head and a dog leash around his neck, about to be paraded in front of more prisoners as an interrogation technique.
There are large differences between the techniques of physical abuse, mental abuse and physical torture and mental torture. All of them can be effective. Reliabilty of results is the question of when to use which method. Some are legal and some aren't.
Would I ever use the illegal ones? You bet your life I would if I thought the circumstances called for it. And I would easily accept the punishments for breaking the law if I had acquired the necessary information/results from the illegal techniques.
If a Muslim insurgent/terrorist tortured or injured my family members, I might even be tempted to start with the illegal methods.