After one spends 45 years in Washington, high farce does not normally throw one off balance. I found the past few days, however, an acid test of my equilibrium.

I missed the National Prayer Breakfast-for the 45th time in a row. But, as I drove to work I listened with rapt attention as President George W. Bush gave his insights on prayer:

Vice President Dick Cheney skipped Thursday's prayer breakfast in order to put the final touches on the speech he gave later that morning to the Conservative Political Action Conference. Perhaps he felt he needed some extra time to devise careful words to extol "the interrogation program run by the CIA...a tougher program for tougher customers, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11," without conceding that the program has involved torture.

But there was a touch of defensiveness in Cheney's remarks, as he saw fit repeatedly to reassure his audience yesterday that America is a "decent" country.

An extreme form of interrogation going back at least as far as the Spanish Inquisition, waterboarding has been condemned as torture by just about everyone-except the hired legal hands of the Bush administration.

On Wednesday President Bush's spokesman Tony Fratto revealed that the White House reserves the right to approve waterboarding again, "depending on the circumstances." Fratto matter-of-factly described the process still followed by the Bush administration to approve torture-er; I mean, "enhanced interrogation techniques" like waterboarding:

Dissing Congress

Cheney's task of reassuring us about our "decency" was made no easier Thursday, when Attorney General Michael Mukasey stonewalled questions from the hapless John Conyers, titular chair of the House Judiciary Committee. Conyers tried, and failed, to get straight answers from Mukasey on torture.

Conyers referred to Hayden's admission about waterboarding and branded the practice "odious." But Mukasey seemed to take perverse delight in "dissing" Conyers, as the expression goes in inner city Washington. Sadly, the tired chairman took the disrespect stoically.

He did summon the courage to ask Attorney General Mukasey directly, "Are you ready to start a criminal investigation into whether this confirmed use of waterboarding by U.S. agents was illegal?"

"No, I am not," Mukasey answered.

Mukasey claimed "waterboarding was found to be permissible under the law as it existed" in the years immediately after 9/11; thus, the Justice Department could not investigate someone for doing something the department had declared legal. Got that?

Mukasey explained:

Oddly, Mukasey himself is on record saying waterboarding would be torture if applied to him. And Michael McConnell, Director of National Intelligence, was even more explicit in taking the same line in an interview with Lawrence Wright of New Yorker magazine. McConnell told Wright that, for him:

Okay, it would be torture if done to you, Mike; how about if done to others? Sadly, McConnell, too, missed the prayer breakfast and the president's moving reminder that we are called "to love a neighbor as ourselves." Is there an exception, perhaps, for detainees?

Cat Out of Bag

When torture first came up during his interview with the New Yorker, McConnell was more circumspect, repeating the obligatory bromide "We don't torture," as former CIA Director George Tenet did in five consecutive sentences while hawking his memoir on 60 Minutes on April 29, 2007. As McConnell grew more relaxed, however, he let slip the rationale for Mukasey's effrontery and the administration's refusal to admit that waterboarding is torture. For anyone paying attention, that rationale has long been a no-brainer. But here is McConnell inadvertently articulating it:

Like death. Even Alberto Gonzales could grasp this at the outset. That explains the overly clever, lawyerly wording in the Jan. 25, 2002 memorandum for the president drafted by the vice president's lawyer, David Addington, but signed by Gonzales. Addington/Gonzales argued that the president's determination that the Geneva agreements on prisoners of war do not apply to al-Qaeda and the Taliban:

Mike McConnell needs to get his own lawyers to bring him up to date on all this. For that memorandum was quickly followed by an action memorandum signed by George W. Bush on Feb. 7, 2002. The president's memo incorporated the exact wording of Addington/Gonzales' bottom line; to wit, the U.S. would "treat the detainees humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of [Geneva]. (emphasis added)

That provided the loophole through which then-defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld and then-CIA director George Tenet and their subordinates drove the Mack truck of torture. Even the Bush-administration-friendly editorial page of the Washington Post saw fit on Friday to declare torture "illegal in all instances," adding that "waterboarding is, and always has been, torture."

Waterboarding has been condemned as torture for a very long time. After WW-II Japanese soldiers were hanged for the "war crime" of waterboarding American soldiers.

Patriots and Prophets

Patriots and prophets have made it clear from our earliest days that such abuse has no place in America.

Virginia's Patrick Henry insisted passionately that "the rack and the screw," as he put it, were barbaric practices that had to be left behind in the Old World, or we are "lost and undone." Attorney General Mukasey, for his part, recently refused to say whether he considers the rack and the screw forms of torture, dismissing the question as hypothetical.

As for prophets, George Hunzinger of Princeton Theological Seminary has awakened enough religious folks to form the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, a coalition of 130 religious organizations from left to right on the political spectrum. Hunzinger puts it succinctly: "To acknowledge that waterboarding is torture is like conceding that the sun rises in the east," adding:

Sadly, Hunzinger and his associates have been unable to overcome the pious complacency of the vast majority of institutional churches, synagogues, and mosques in this country and their reluctance to exercise moral leadership.

How It Looks From Outside

Sometimes it takes a truth-telling outsider to throw light on our moral failures.

South African Methodist Bishop Peter Storey, erstwhile chaplain to Nelson Madela in prison and longtime outspoken opponent of apartheid, has this to say to those clergy who might be moved to preach more than platitudes:

Mukasey's thumbing his nose at Conyers' committee yesterday was simply the most recent display of contempt for Congress on the part of the Bush administration. The Founders expected our representatives in Congress to be taken seriously by the executive branch, and expected that Members of Congress would hold senior executives accountable-to the point of impeaching them, when necessary, for high crimes and misdemeanors.

That used to worry those officials and put a brake on more outlandish behavior. Not any more.

No Worries, George

One reads George Tenet's memoirs with some nostalgia for the days of a modicum of congressional oversight, and with a strong sense of irony-as he confesses concern that Congress might one day hold him and others accountable for taking liberties with national and international law.

It seems likely that then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and David Addington counseled Tenet that his concerns were quaint and obsolete and, alas, they may have been right, the way things have been going. But Tenet apparently entertained lingering misgivings-perhaps even qualms of conscience.

In the immediate post-9/11 period, Tenet says he told the president "our only real ally" on the Afghan border was Uzbekistan, "where we had established important intelligence-collection capabilities." We now know from UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray that those "collection capabilities" included the most primitive methods of torture, including boiling alleged "terrorists" alive.

Tenet adds that he stressed the importance of being able to detain unilaterally al-Qaeda operatives around the world. His worries shine through the rather telling sentences that follow:

Tenet need not have worried. He would be shielded from accountability by a timid Congress as well as an arrogant White House able to arrogate unprecedented power to itself and to shield those it wished to protect.

Setting the Tone

It was President George W. Bush who set the tone from the outset. After his address to the nation on the evening of 9/11, he assembled his top national security aides in the White House bunker-the easier, perhaps, to foster a bunker mentality. Among them was counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke, who quoted the president in his memoir:

Clarke, of course, took his book's title from the oath of office we all swore as military officers and/or senior government officials: "To defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic."

John Ashcroft, head of the Department of Justice at the time, fell in lockstep with the thrust of the president's comment dismissing any concern with international law-or, as would quickly be seen, domestic law, as well. With the enthusiastic assistance of David Addington, the affable Ashcroft assembled a cabal of Mafia-like lawyers whose imaginative legal opinions on torture, warrantless eavesdropping, and other abuses mark them forever as "domestic enemies" of the Constitution.

Add Mukasey to this distinguished roster.

Torture: the Hallmark

What is not widely known is that Justice Department-approved torture was first applied on an American citizen, John Walker Lindh, who was captured in Afghanistan in late November 2001. The White House and corporate press immediately sensationalized Lindh as "the American Taliban."

Jesselyn Radack, a conscientious legal advisor in the Justice Department's Professional Responsibility Advisory Office, which gives ethics advice to Department attorneys, insisted that Lindh be advised of his rights before any interrogation. Instead, he was tortured mercilessly during the first few days of his internment and denied medical care.

Lindh had had the foolishness and bad luck to be in the wrong place at the wrong time; i. e., in a large group of prisoners rounded up by CIA and Army paramilitary forces-too large a group, it turned out.

A spontaneous uprising took place, and CIA paramilitary officer Johnny "Mike" Spann, who had questioned Lindh just minutes before, was shot dead. Outraged, Spann's colleagues applied "frontier justice," totally ignoring the Constitutional cautions of Ms. Radack.

The Department of Justice moved quickly to fire Radack for her principled stand. But she had the presence of mind to save emails providing chapter and verse of the difficult exchanges in which she had insisted on respect for Lindh's rights as an American citizen. Newsweek carried the story briefly, but neither Congress nor anyone else in the media showed much interest.

Radack's book recounting this experience, The Canary in the Coalmine: Blowing the Whistle in the Case of "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh, is available on line at: http://www.patriotictruthteller.net/.

Against this backdrop, together with Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and prisons in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, Patrick Henry's warning remains a challenge for our time: Are we "lost and undone?" I think not; but we had better get it together soon, for, as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., cautioned, "There is such a thing as too late."