Well, maybe Nancy Pelosi is right, that the CIA was lying to members of Congress about “enhanced interrogation,” a phrase that has rapidly acquired the status of such great old euphemisms as “collateral damage.” We can talk another time about what we have done to the moral integrity of our language –an issue that the brilliant critic, George Steiner, has already discussed in reference to German and the legacy of the Nazi era—but, for now, let’s cut to the chase. The issue is torture and, in such matters, equivocation is to no one’s credit. Torture is not something that is bad because it was “only” done to an innocent prisoner once or because it was done hundreds of times to Abu Zubaydah. It is wrong once and it is wrong a hundred times. And it doesn’t matter who does it, whether they are the instigators or the perpetrators. In the case of waterboarding by CIA interrogators, it wasn’t acceptable because it was ordered or legally sanctioned by shyster lawyers. Torture as a crime against humanity cannot be subject to such moral gamesmanship. The interrogator is guilty; Jay Bybee, the head of the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, now a Court of Appeals Judge– whose casuistry approved the deed in 2002– is guilty; and a whole host of senior members of the Bush administration are guilty.

They include Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser to former President George W. Bush. On April 22, Fox News reported that “Condoleezza Rice verbally approved the CIA’s request to subject high-ranking Al Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah to waterboarding in July 2002, the earliest known decision by a Bush administration official to OK use of the simulated drowning technique.” “Rice’s role,” they continue, “was detailed in a narrative released Wednesday by the Senate Intelligence Committee. It provides the most detailed timeline yet for how the CIA’s harsh interrogation program was conceived and approved at the highest levels in the Bush White House.”

And there is the former Vice President. On October 26, 2006, MSNBC reported: “Dick Cheney, US vice-president, has endorsed the use of ‘water boarding’ for terror suspects and confirmed that the controversial interrogation technique was used on Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, the senior al-Qaeda operative now being held at Guantánamo Bay. Cheney was responding to a radio interviewer from North Dakota station WDAY who asked whether water boarding, which involves simulated drowning, was a ‘no-brainer’ if the information it yielded would save American lives. ‘It’s a no-brainer for me,’ Cheney replied. The comments by the vice-president, who has been one of the leading advocates of reducing limitations on what interrogation techniques can be used in the war on terror, are the first public confirmation that water boarding has been used on suspects held in US custody.”

Of course, in Cheney’s reptilian mind, waterboarding is not torture. As he said to his interviewer, “We don’t torture … We live up to our obligations in international treaties that we’re party to and so forth. But the fact is, you can have a fairly robust interrogation program without torture and we need to be able to do that.” Cheney should read up on the treaties to which the U.S. is signatory. They include the UN Concvention Against Torture. Article I of the Convention clearly states: “torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity.”

That certainly sounds as if it would include waterboarding. But, that’s hardly my assessment alone. I have Republicans and Baptists on my side as well. As Fox News went on to note: Cheney’s “remarks appear to stand at odds with the views of three key Republican senators who helped draft the recently passed Military Commission Act, and who argue that water boarding is not permitted according to that law.” Even more recently, on May 5th of this year, Dr. Richard Land, the president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention (the largest Protestant Church in the country) and a leading abortion critic, said, in an interview with Religion News Service: “I consider waterboarding torture.” It “violates everything we stand for.”

It, therefore, came as no surprise, that, according to CNN (on April 23 of this year), a Senate intelligence report prepared by the attorney general’s office at the request of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, noted that “Top Bush administration officials gave the CIA approval to use waterboarding…On July 17, 2002, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, who later became secretary of state, said the CIA could proceed with ‘alternative interrogation methods,’ including waterboarding, when questioning suspected al Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah. The decision was contingent on the Justice Department’s determining the method’s legality. A week later, Attorney General John Ashcroft had determined the ‘proposed interrogation techniques were lawful,’ the report said…The techniques again gained the endorsement of the Bush administration in spring 2003 when the CIA asked for a ‘reaffirmation of the policies and practices in the interrogation program.’ In a meeting that included Vice President Dick Cheney, CIA Director George Tenet, Ashcroft, Rice and their legal counsels, ‘the principals reaffirmed that the CIA program was lawful and reflected administration policy,’ the report said.”

As Dick Cheney, would say, it’s a no-brainer. Water-boarding is torture. Torture is illegal. It was approved at the highest levels of government. So, high officials must be brought to justice. That includes the former president of the United States, George W. Bush, who, just in case there was any doubt about his endorsement of torture, in March, 2008, “vetoed legislation meant to ban the CIA from using waterboarding and other harsh interrogation tactics.”

I don’t, by the way, put Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, in the same bag. But, I think she and many others could have been much harsher, much more vocal critics much earlier. She said the other day that, by the time there was any intimation that waterboarding was being used, she was no longer the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee. At that point, in her words, “It was clear we had to change the leadership in Congress and in the White House. That was my job — the Congress part.” No, that was just part of her job. She and any others who even dimly suspected that torture was being used had a responsibility to speak out, however ineffectually. That is the nature of conscience.

But, beyond that, it is, frankly, almost past time for the White House to get on board the moral train. President Obama has declared emphatically that waterboarding is torture, but, for reasons of political expediency, he is allowing those who engineered and carried out this policy to go unpunished. And, so long as he does, paradoxically, he is taunted, almost daily, by our former Vice President, Dick Cheney, a man of abject moral stature, who implicitly challenges him, defies him to do justice. He must respond. If that means initiating a course of events that puts Cheney, Rice, Ashcroft, Tenet and Bush in jail, so be it. But, without even admitting of that possibility, our country’s moral future is suspect. As Emile Zola said in 1898 in J’Accuse: “when truth is buried underground, it grows and it builds up so much force that the day it explodes it blasts everything with it.” That would be a terrible legacy for Barack Obama.