Too graphic for the CIA?

ONCE the CIA got hold of Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, two leading Al Qaeda operatives, agents interrogated them harshly in 2002 and taped the sessions as an instruction video for future grillings. Then-chief of CIA operations Jose Rodriguez was wrong to order the tapes destroyed in 2005, but the true outrage is that the president and vice president of the United States gave the CIA permission to use torture.

George Bush and Dick Cheney deny that's what it was. But the two Al Qaeda men, according to The New York Times, were subjected to loud noise, put in painful positions, isolated, and waterboarded. That's torture. The administration acknowledged as much when it issued a new policy this year for CIA interrogations. The allowable methods remain severe, but government officials told the Times that they forbid waterboarding.

Authorization for the CIA's use of torture came from on high, in the days just after the Sept. 11 attacks. "It's going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective," Cheney said on Sept. 16, 2001. Four years later, with the disclosure of mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison, Rodriguez realized that release of the 2002 tapes would have serious legal implications for the agents involved and represent a public-relations debacle for the CIA.

Bush contends that these interrogations produced valuable information. Perhaps they did, but that does not justify the use of torture. This barbaric practice violates the basic dignity owed every human being, defies international law, puts future American prisoners at risk of the same treatment, diminishes US standing in the world, and preempts the use of less coercive techniques that might yield the same or better information.

And the harsh methods also coarsen CIA agents. Rodriguez should know. According to Time magazine, he was an agent in Latin America in the 1980s, when the CIA was complicit in major human rights violations, including murder. Torture is a step or two away from that, and needs to be stopped before it becomes a CIA habit.

Senator Joseph Biden has called for the appointment of a special counsel. But congressional committees have the ability now to investigate the destruction of the tapes, which apparently occurred without the authorization of higher-ups, and the CIA and Attorney General Michael Mukasey need to press their own inquiries.

Lawmakers should focus most intently on the underlying issue: that CIA agents have engaged in torture. Congress needs to approve a measure, now before a conference committee, that would ban any interrogation techniques not in the Army Field Manual, which prohibits abusive methods. If a CIA spymaster can't allow anyone to see what his agents are doing to prisoners, Congress should not allow the agents to do it.