Torture is back. In fact, it never left the building.
Often repudiated publicly by President Bush and his minions, the harsh interrogation of suspected terrorists apparently remains well in fashion in the Bush administration.
As revealed yesterday by the New York Times, it turns out that a 2004 directive from the Justice Department banning torture as "abhorrent" was reversed only a few months later.
Then-newly appointed Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales - now gone, thankfully - approved a legal opinion that government officials described to the Times as "an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency."
No doubt, this would have been embarrassing had it come to light at the time. Little wonder, the memo was kept secret until now.
It's bad enough that the world's greatest democracy responded to the dangers of a post-9/11 world by pursuing secret detention and harsh interrogation of suspected al-Qaeda terrorists.
When they were called out for trampling core American values - by Congress, by the Supreme Court, by international human-rights groups - Bush administration officials talked of reform. Now, it appears that the president's pledge to scale back on harsh treatment of detainees was no more than talk, so the affront to the nation's values is all the more troubling.
By international treaty and U.S. law, "cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment of detainees is banned. That should be the guiding principle for American interrogators, no matter what the threat the nation faces. But this administration repeatedly has gone to extraordinary lengths to work an end-run.
The low point was the infamous 2002 torture memo approved by then-White House counsel Gonzales. It said American agents could do no wrong in their interrogation practices - as long as they stopped short of inflicting pain that was the equivalent to organ failure or "even death." That was torture by another name.
These latest revelations of back-room legal machinations have to make Americans wonder what they can believe from the Bush administration. Sure, yesterday, White House press secretary Dana Perino said, "It is a policy of the United States that we do not torture, and we do not."
Rote press-office denial, or Justice Department legal opinion approving torture? One of these statements, as Nixon White House press secretary Ron Ziegler used to say, must be "inoperative."
In a few short years, it's appalling how much of America's moral authority and prestige has been squandered by the administration's free-wheeling approach to right and wrong.