Torture, Back in Play

And you thought the health-care debate was divisive.

With the Justice Department's release of a report on CIA interrogations, and especially Eric Holder's decision to name a special prosecutor, the administration achieved the singular goal of being attacked by both sides.

President Obama, with his let's-not-look-backward outlook, clearly didn't want this. How does a debate over Bush-era abuses help him boost the economy, reform health care or sell more Government Motors cars? It doesn't.

At the same time, it was probably unavoidable. An attorney general has to make independent decisions on criminal investigations. Think of Richard Nixon misusing the FBI during Watergate, or Janet Reno naming special prosecutors to investigate Bill Clinton. Holder may be a friend of Obama's, but if he doesn't weigh all the legal factors on his own, he isn't doing his job.

There is no squaring this circle. The left wants a full-scale investigation of Bush administration torture that could reach all the way to the Cheney level. The right considers it an outrage that CIA officers who dealt with despicable terrorists should be subjected to after-the-fact investigations by a new administration. And the details of what was done in America's name are cringe-inducing, even if they were carried out against mass murderers and would-be killers.

This is the debate that consumed Bush's second term, ever since Abu Ghraib. The current president has ended some of the harshest interrogation techniques approved by his predecessor. Does justice, both legal and moral, require that we fully exhume the abuses of the past? Judging by the cable coverage -- where the story has blown away the news of Michael Jackson's death being ruled a homicide -- this is going to reverberate for a long time to come.

"No matter which way he turns," Dan Balz writes in the WP, "President Obama can't seem to shake the legacy of George W. Bush's presidency. On two issues this week, the Obama administration broke with and embraced the policies of his predecessor, drawing criticism on successive days from both ends of the political spectrum." The other is continuing the process of rendition.

The New York Times focuses on the regs:

"Two 17-watt fluorescent-tube bulbs -- no more, no less -- illuminated each cell, 24 hours a day. White noise played constantly but was never to exceed 79 decibels. A prisoner could be doused with 41-degree water but for only 20 minutes at a stretch.

"The Central Intelligence Agency's secret interrogation program operated under strict rules, and the rules were dictated from Washington with the painstaking, eye-glazing detail beloved by any bureaucracy. . . .

"But the strong impression that emerges from the documents, many with long passages blacked out for secrecy, is by no means one of gung-ho operatives running wild. It is a portrait of overwhelming control exercised from C.I.A. headquarters and the Department of Justice -- control Bush administration officials say was intended to ensure that the program was safe and legal."

Rich Lowry expresses a bit of sympathy for Leon Panetta: