It is so easy for some people. A year or so ago, they supported Sen Edwards, so every other Democratic candidate was wrong about almost everything. Later, they supported the eventual winning candidate, so that his opponent became the devil itself: a warmonger, no doubt, who was insignificantly different from even President Bush.

Those people always know the right thing to do. Though their voices were awfully quiet, they knew how to respond to the attack on our country and the murder of several thousand people who were simply trying to go to work on a beautiful late summer morning, or were flying to the west coast, or who tried to rescue people trapped in burning buildings.

Where was the President of the United States that day? Did he spend the month after being told an attack was imminent making sure the government did everything it could to prevent the attack? When he took over the presidency, by dint of friends in high places, and was told what the Taliban was all about, and that, in addition to torturing anyone in the country over which they ruled who did not share their religious beliefs, and destroying the symbols which were meaningful to others, despite their historical significance, that they harbored people who wanted to harm this country, did he do anything about that? If terrorists win by terrorizing they were very successful on 9/11. We---as a people and as a nation---were terrorized that day. Panicked into forgetting the look on the fact of the President as he hop scotched around the country. Panicked into believing that when he read Michael Garson's words a week later before a joint session of Congress, we had a man who could lead us back to safety. that Just as with the emperor with no clothes could be seen to be wearing the most beautiful garments on earth, we were told by pontificators of so many persuasions that his speech was the grandest they had ever heard, and the Senator from New York who whispered something to the person sitting next to her while it was being delivered should be ashamed while the surprisingly great orator made his uplifting comments, such as that

Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign, unlike any other we have ever seen. It may include dramatic strikes, visible on TV, and covert operations, secret even in success.

and

We will come together to strengthen our intelligence capabilities to know the plans of terrorists before they act, and to find them before they strike.

and

Great harm has been done to us. We have suffered great loss. And in our grief and anger we have found our mission and our moment. Freedom and fear are at war. The advance of human freedom -- the great achievement of our time, and the great hope of every time -- now depends on us. Our nation, this generation will lift a dark threat of violence from our people and our future. We will rally the world to this cause by our efforts, by our courage. We will not tire, we will not falter, and we will not fail....
Fellow citizens, we'll meet violence with patient justice -- assured of the rightness of our cause, and confident of the victories to come.

Scared into letting this incompetent little fool do whatever he claimed to think was the right way to respond even if he did not know the difference between Sunni and Shi'ite, or thought that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were allies instead of mortal enemies.

And, my sainted friends, he was as popular a president at that point as anyone can remember. If he said it should be done, it was. When even the tiniest jokes were made about this president, the person who told them would be shunned and lose his job.

And three years later, unable to go through a political debate without some device where his handlers could feed him answers to the simplest of questions, after books and movies had revealed what a fraud this little man was, more people voted for him than for his opponent and he was re-elected.

So, you say that what he and his henchman told our intelligence and military personnel to do was "torture" as anyone could plainly see. They should have resisted him, you say. Maybe they should have tried to resign (although the military doesn't really allow that for many who serve our armed forces). They should have revealed what he was doing to an uninformed public which thought that the government they elected was operating under the specific rules laid out by the law, and not doing anything to embarrass us in the world's eye. They surely should have disregarded the orders given to them and risked incarceration themselves.

It is all so simple.

You tell me that is just so clear that what the elected President of the United States said to do was against the law. Here is how the United States Code defines it:

(1) "torture" means an act committed by a person acting under the color of law specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody or physical control;

(2) "severe mental pain or suffering" means the prolonged mental harm caused by or resulting from--
(A) the intentional infliction or threatened infliction of severe physical pain or suffering;
(B) the administration or application, or threatened administration or application, of mind-altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality;
(C) the threat of imminent death; or
(D) the threat that another person will imminently be subjected to death, severe physical pain or suffering, or the administration or application of mind-altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or personality

You say that Sgt. Sad Sack, or even Major Smarty-Pants or an agent of a CIA accused of inadequately "connecting the dots" to prevent the attack (even though your CIA told the president enough that a normal one would have roused himself from vacation instead of saying that a CIA agent's "ass was covered" by the advisory) should have said that what they were being asked to do fits the statute even though the President's lawyers said they did not.

For me, it is not so easy. I am sorry if by this admission I fail to live up to your high moral code. I admire you for it, but I did not see or hear you when your voice contradicting the generally accepted truths of 2001, 2002 and 2003, might have meant something.

There are heroes of that time. Two jump immediately to mind: Richard Clarke exposed this phony president for who he was and apologized to the victims of 9/11 for a government that he was part of, which failed us. Secretary O'Neal told Ron Suskind that some petulant child was pretending to be president and there were others: FBI Agent Coleen Rowley was one.

This week we learned of yet another, and he may well be able to help resolve the issues before us. His name is Philip Zelikow and he was the person who ran the 9/11 Commission for the Famous Names who got the front seats and together managed to come up with one of the most important and interesting government reports ever written. When he was done with that, Mr. Zelikow went to the Department of State to work under Secretary Rice. In a blog post this week and an interview with Rachel Maddow, he writes about a memo he sent to those who received the Justice Department explanation, by its Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) about the legality of the program being pursued. He did it, Mr. Zelikow says, to

warn... them that other lawyers (and judges) might find the OLC views unsustainable.

As Mr. Zelikow says, his views were only those of one lawyer. And we do not jail people for having the wrong opinion or for simple disagreements in the law.

And, thus, as Mr. Zelikow says, the people who received what he wrote:

were entitled to ignore my views. They did more than that: The White House attempted to collect and destroy all copies of my memo.

Now we are onto something. It is one thing to have a robust debate among lawyers and a decision made as to which course to follow. It is another when any dissenting view is suppressed since that makes it appear that one opinion is all that will be tolerated, even if it is bit legally defensible against any other opinion.

In 1943, the Supreme Court tried to explain the difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion and, I think, the formulation can easly be adapted when trying to determine whether any legal opinion is an actual expression of thought, or simply justification for something that is otherwise clearly illegal. The great Justice Jackson said that the line between a legal attempt to bend the law to support a theory as to taxability of an item of income, and a criminally "willful" sttempt to violate the law, could be determined this way:

By way of illustration, and not by way of limitation, we would think affirmative willful attempt may be inferred from conduct such as keeping a double set of books, making false entries of alterations, or false invoices or documents, destruction of books or records, concealment of assets or covering up sources of income, handling of one's affairs to avoid making the records usual in transactions of the kind, and any conduct, the likely effect of which would be to mislead or to conceal. If the tax-evasion motive plays any part in such conduct the offense may be made out even though the conduct may also serve other purposes such as concealment of other crime.

Spies v. United States, 317 U.S. 492, 499 (1943).

Collecting opposing memos to destroy them sounds, in this definition, as the work of a criminal.

But these are not easy questions, no matter what you say. The people of this country wanted, by huge majorities, to abandon what we stood for, in return for illusions: that our safety could be insured, that our leaders were great and up to the task, and that our cause was so just that anything was permitted. You may not like it---I certainly don't---but it was so. Think back.

On the other hand, Vice President Cheney and his morning mouthpiece of MSNBC, can stop trying to tell us that torture works. If some useful information was obtained from those who were tortured, nobody can show that the same information could not have been gathered, maybe sooner, by trained interrogators working under the established rules under which voluntary statements are obtained by law enforcement every day. These are not new issues. The famous Miranda decision catalogued in 1966 what would and would not be tolerated in a nation that prizes its legal traditions above almost everything else. We were told then, that effective law enforcement was impossible under the rules defining "due process." That turned out not to be true (though courts have unwisely tried to expand the circumstances under which statements made by criminal defendants can be excluded from trials).

Our government has a primary responsibility to protect and defend us. I am not convinced that they cannot do so unless we join the other barbaric countries and actors which have descended to the depths of humanity in their zeal to protect what they see to be their interests. But I do not get to decide these issues for my country. Nobody does. These are the things we decide as a country, and my side lost that debate.

As a people we were blind, even if we were blinded. It has happened many times before in our history. I am more interested in our learning that lesson than I am in trying to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, our historic predicate for finding a person guilty of a crime. The idea that people who lose an election got to jail for doing what people supported at the time is anathema to me. But preventing people from considering legal arguments is, too.

These are not easy questions. No matter what you say.