The truth about torture comes out And if punishment is next, so be it

CAN WE HANDLE the truth about the torture done in our name? Because there is more to come.

The April 16 release of four Justice Department memos purporting to provide justification for torture opened a floodgate of information about this dark episode in our history - some of it new, some of it simply ignored before, none of it complete.

The memos, written in 2002, provide legal fig leafs to allow the CIA to use nightmarish interrogation methods: slamming detainees into walls, depriving them of sleep, confining them in small boxes with bugs - and water-boarding, lots of water-boarding.

Since then, new revelations have added to the conscience-curdling facts:

* Two detainees were water-boarded 266 times. Al Qaeda mastermind Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times in one month, calling into question the worth of any information obtained.

* Philip Zelikow, former adviser to then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, says he was told to destroy all copies of a 2002 memo he wrote that characterized the torture memos as "deeply unsound" and "unreasonable."

* Far from being adopted only when less harsh

methods proved futile, the CIA made plans for torture months before asking for the legal opinions it now is hiding behind, according to a Senate intelligence committee report released Tuesday. The CIA planned the techniques even before it had any high-level al Qaeda operatives in custody.

* A psychiatrist quoted in the Senate report said

the interrogations focused less on preventing further terrorist attacks and more on finding (nonexistent) links between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. (That was 4,274 American deaths ago.)

* The interrogations promoted by the CIA, and briefed to Congress, came from a program developed to train U.S. soldiers to resist torture. No one researched the readily available history of the methods, which were devised by Chinese communists in the 1950s to force false confessions for use at show trials. And that's what we know about U.S.-sponsored torture only this week. In the near future, the results of an investigation into the memos by the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility will be released, a report that Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., a member of the intelligence committee, says will be "devastating." And now that the once-classified memos have been released, other people with firsthand knowledge of what went on are free to speak. Some surely will.

Presumably, President Obama already knew what we are now learning - and much of what we soon will know. So it's even more disturbing that, in releasing the memos, Obama promised that CIA operatives would not be prosecuted because they were, in effect, following orders.

Investigating criminal wrongdoing would be looking backward, not forward, he said. Now should be a time of "reflection" not "retribution."

In another time, that was called the Nuremberg defense, and it was just as bogus then as it is now.

Besides, decisions about who gets prosecuted by the independent Justice Department aren't for the president to make. This was the position the president arrived at on Tuesday, but only after he and his top aides provided fuel for charges that criminal prosecutions are "retribution."

But at least Obama now has it right. In recent days, Attorney General Eric Holder has made it known that he is considering appointing a special prosecutor to examine the evidence. This is the way a country founded on the rule of law should proceed. We can handle the truth. And if it's found that people broke the law, we also can handle meting out the consequences that should go with it. *