Unsurprisingly for someone who's written such an excellent book, Jane asks an excellent series of questions. About two years ago, I had lunch with a former CIA official who tried to stop the torture. This person encountered a variety of opinion inside what used to be called the Directorate of Operations about whether it was indeed immoral or illegal to subject detainees to the "enhanced interrogation" regimen that Jane explores. But there was complete unanimity that CIA would end up holding the bag, marched before indignant legislators, smeared in the press, left at the mercy of grand juries -- all while the Bush administration officials who ordered and authorized the torture return to, say, their tenured positions at Boalt Hall.

Some of that reflects the odd culture of self-pity often seen at the CIA. But it also reflects a cardinal rule of policymakers: when the policy goes off the rails, blame the intelligence people. Not for nothing is Jose Rodriguez, former chief of the agency's clandestine service, the only U.S. official currently at risk of facing charges, not Yoo nor Addington nor Gonzales nor Cheney nor Bush.

So, yeah, there should be prosecutions -- or, rather, there should be the opposite sort of prosecutions that occurred after Abu Ghraib. Start with, say Addington and Yoo.

This all bears as much relationship to reality as my fantasy baseball team does to the 2008 postseason, but why not sketch out a hypothetical case. In January, President Obama directs Attorney General Feingold to put together a team for a thoroughgoing investigation of culpability of the origins of the Bush torture policy, with an eye toward criminal prosecutions. He takes the high-minded approach in public: No administration is above the law, and the only way preserve the principle of the rule of law is to punish lawbreakers, no matter how powerful they were. He orders that the Office of Legal Counsel and the CIA and the National Security Council and the Defense Department declassify a welter of material that we haven't yet seen, like the OLC's August 2002 recommendations for the legality of techniques like waterboarding. The Senate Judiciary Committee prepares for marathon hearings, with star witnesses lining up to take the Fifth.

What the hell, let's be crass. There's a huge political upside for the Obama administration to do this. All of a sudden, reporters like us are too busy with untangling the origins of the torture regime to focus on, say, the Obama health care plan, or the Obama Iraq withdrawal plan or the Obama economic-recovery plan. And the opponents of that agenda are either facing potential indictment or helping their friends defray their legal expenses. Everyone (who isn't a torture advocate) wins!

To be serious, the merits of the approach are pretty straightforward. Executives tend not to give up their own discretionary authority voluntarily. It's surprising that few people interpreted Obama's vote for the FISA bill as a cynical one -- after all, Obama probably thought, if I'm going to be president, maybe I'd like to engage in some 4th-Amendment-skirting domestic surveillance myself. Bush has claimed a breathtaking amount of authority for the presidency in violation of laws that were considered unambiguous before his administration came to office. The only way this gets rolled back is when someone who planned this policy goes to jail -- not the CIA interrogator who implemented it. Which means, in all likelihood, we'll be stuck with torture as an instrument of policy, with a tendentious but ready-made rationale available to future presidents during moments of expediency.

Given all that, isn't it practically guaranteed that Bush issues blanket pardons for torture as his last big act in office?