IT'S NOT TORTURE WHEN WE DO IT:

Yet Obama's stated desire to "look forward, not back" has been central to denying the public reckoning that the nation needs. In the absence of such a reckoning, polls shows support for torture has increased. The public has come to see torture as a viable policy option -- one that Bush was for and Obama is against. Many Americans don't regard torture as the immoral and illegal act it is.

The Bush administration's embrace of torture after Sept. 11 broke the national consensus against it. And it remains broken. Unless it is repaired, it's entirely possible that a future president could reauthorize torture -- and undo Obama's executive order with the stroke of a pen.

Obama's decision not to prosecute the perpetrators or authors of the previous administration's torture policy, coupled with the apparent ambiguity in the Obama administration's legal interpretations of the treaty, make it even more critical that the White House seize the opportunity presented by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's landmark report on the CIA's "enhanced interrogation" program to rebuild the national consensus against torture. A bipartisan majority of the committee voted to adopt the report, declassify it and release it. Leading Republicans, including Senators John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.) supported this.

But the president was slow to back the report's release and instead allowed the CIA to decide on all redactions -- despite the agency's conflict of interest and possible illegal monitoring of the intelligence committee staff.

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