Editorial: Darkness revealed

The welcome light being shed by President Obama on the Bush administration's harsh interrogation tactics has a dark side. It forces Americans to acknowledge the unspeakable horrors inflicted upon terrorism suspects in their name.

Without question, it's in the national interest to get out all the truth in how the government's antiterror tactics ran amok. Obama has banned any repeat of these tactics, but only by establishing a historical record can the right lessons be taken from the excesses.

The more difficult question confronting Washington policymakers, and the nation itself, is what to do next. If U.S. agents are found to have tortured detainees, should they or their masters - including those responsible at the highest levels - be prosecuted?

The more information that comes out, the worse it looks. Justice Department memos released two weeks ago showed that two al-Qaeda leaders were subjected to the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding 266 times, sometimes as often as five or six times in a single day.

CIA agents made TV's torture-happy Jack Bauer look like a sissy.

Even though Bush lawyers - including John C. Yoo, now a law professor who writes a monthly Inquirer column - blessed the harsh CIA tactics, it's telling that the FBI backed out of interrogations when waterboarding started.

Maybe FBI officials checked their history books: learning that U.S. officials leveled war-crimes charges against Japanese soldiers who waterboarded Allied prisoners in World War II. Chinese communists also used the tactic in Korea to elicit false confessions from prisoners.

What manner of nation would countenance this brutal and life-threatening treatment of detainees? The answer coming from Bush interrogation defenders, in effect, was: a nation that wanted to be safe at all costs after losing 3,000 lives in the 2001 attacks.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney last week called for further disclosures of documents he says will prove waterboarding worked in providing vital details on planned attacks. By that ends-justifies-the-means standard, though, any conduct, no matter how inhumane, would be OK.

In fact, Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair said that, while in "some instances" the information obtained was valuable, waterboarding was unnecessary.

And in its exhaustive report on how harsh interrogations using forced nudity, sleep deprivation, extremes of heat and cold, wall-slamming, and the like were exported from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the Senate Armed Services Committee concluded: "Those efforts damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority."

The grim trend evident in these disclosures had the president and Democrats in Congress changing course at week's end over Obama's earlier suggestion for an independent review. The difficult calculus is whether the president's economic recovery agenda would be derailed by a drawn-out inquiry.

At some point, though, the weight of the facts - stubborn things - may outweigh all political concerns. Indeed, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. already has pledged to "follow the law wherever it takes us."

Above all, it's important to keep getting out the full story.