The essential point that Christopher and Jane have been making is correct: the public needs to be patiently brought along on this issue. That's not a small point. It drives the process. So those who care about the torture issue serve their cause best by pushing to fully expose the facts. What, exactly, was done. Who gave the directions for it to be done. What did those high up in the Administration know, and what did they do when they learned. I expect the ultimate evidence will be extremely damning, as suggested by the statement that John Bellinger gave to Senator Levin last week, and I am certain that the most damning things are still being suppressed on bogus claims of national security.

Figures in the CIA who supported destruction of the torture tapes were largely driven by the same concern: when the public sees this, we won't look good. So it is imperative that the public see all this evidence and form its own views.

A justice of the South African Supreme Court told me last year that opinion in South Africa's white community was strongly in support of harsh measures, including torture, to support apartheid through the sixties and seventies. White opinion began to change gradually as all those practices became a matter of public knowledge and destroyed the Afrikaners' sense of righteousness. He told me he had no doubt that the same process would work in America--get the facts out there, and be sure that the people really know what is being done. Alex Gibney's film Taxi to the Dark Side does this. It needs to be seen by millions, just as it is being viewed now by the cadets at West Point and the JAG trainees at the Army JAG school in Charlottesville, Virginia.

And public opinion is slowly but steadily moving in the right directly. Look at the conference that Evangelicals hosted at Mercer University in Atlanta a month ago, for instance. Public opinion polling shows that the Southeastern Religious Right is the bastion of support for the Bush torture policies in the United States. But in the Atlanta conference, a large part of the religious leadership of the Evangelical movement mustered against torture--for the first time.

Or look at the American Psychological Association. This was the sole professional association to give some measure of support to the Bush Administration's position. The organization's leadership seems to have been in bed with the Pentagon on the issue, denying that psychologists were healthcare professionals and denying the Hippocratic oath's ethical injunction against harming a patient. The membership of the APA just rebelled against its own leadership, overturning their position and adopting a strict mandate prohibiting psychologists from participating in "the program" in any form. And today, the APA's president has written President Bush advising him that psychologists are now precluded on ethical grounds from participating in the "program." He tells Bush in his letter (http://www.apa.org/releases/kazdin-to-bush1008.pdf), "there have been many reports, from credible sources, of torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of detainees during your term in office." This is another step. And another reason why full disclosure is necessary.

Jane is right to ask for full disclosure of documents. We hardly know at this point what has been withheld. But the Administration's withholding of documents that state legal policy is outrageous and virtually unprecedented. There are now at least seven memoranda done by the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel which appear to have been crafted for the purpose of inducing the torture or cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of prisoners in violation of U.S. law and international obligations. These memoranda are themselves potential criminal acts, and those involved in crafting them will, I believe, likely be both disbarred and prosecuted. But the path must begin with disclosure of what they have done. That they seek to do it in the shadows is telling indeed.

And we need to be on guard against the destruction of documents. In a series of litigations now, documentary evidence of prisoner mistreatment has mysteriously disappeared when a court ordered it to be turned over. Six prosecutors at Guantanamo have now said they could not proceed to prosecute cases for ethical reasons. When their accounts are fully aired, I am confident we will learn that they discovered that evidence had been withheld or tampered with by the Government. The Justice Department itself seems, rather than a guardian of the law, to be a prime offender--engaging in criminal obstruction. We will have to find a proper vehicle for holding those who engaged in this conduct to account. But we should develop the facts carefully first.