If it weren't so disturbing, it would be funny.

CIA interrogators had been handed Abu Zubaydah, a Saudi national believed to be a top strategist for al-Qaida. He'd been captured in Pakistan in March 2002 and flown to a secret CIA prison in Thailand. How best to get information out of him?

This wasn't Jack Bauer with a bomb ticking on "24." These were bureaucrats trying not to screw up.

Someone heard that Zubaydah was afraid of insects, so they came up with the idea of putting him in a small box with a live insect.

Better check with Washington, someone says. Is a bug in a box torture?

So the e-mails fly and back comes the response from Jay Bybee, then the head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel. He was the Bush administration's guy in charge of making sure interrogation techniques looked like they complied with the 1949 Geneva Conventions without actually, you know, complying with them.

A couple of hours in a box is fine, Bybee opines, because it won't imminently threaten death. As to the bug, he says, the law says you can't threaten him with imminent death, so make sure he knows it's not a poisonous bug.

Slamming prisoners into a wall, same thing: Make sure it's a flexible wall and there's a restraint on the guy's neck so he doesn't get whiplash. Slamming, good, Bybee says, whiplash, bad.

This kind of sharp legal mind deserved a lifetime appointment to the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, which is what President George W. Bush gave him 2003, long before news of any Justice Department torture memos began to leak.

Last week, President Barack Obama, under pressure from a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, ordered four of the Justice Department's pre-2005 interrogation opinions declassified. At the same time, Obama said CIA interrogators who relied on Justice Department opinions would not be prosecuted.

On Monday, the president visited CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., and affirmed that "What makes the United States special ... is precisely the fact that we are willing to uphold our values and ideals even when it's hard, not just when it's easy."

His decisions made neither the left nor the right completely happy. Human rights groups say that by absolving CIA interrogators, the United States violated international laws that require human rights abuses to be prosecuted.

The "I was only following orders" defense is as inadmissible now as it was in Nuremberg in 1946, these groups say. How do you waterboard a suspect 83 times in one month — as was done to Zubaydah — without concluding you've probably gone over the top?

From the right came former Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey and former CIA Director Michael Hayden. Writing in The Wall Street Journal, they argued that the effect of Obama's decisions will be "to invite the kind of institutional timidity and fear of recrimination that weakened intelligence gathering in the past."

If it was Obama's hope to lay the torture issue to rest, he will be disappointed. Too many issues remain, most fundamentally, did the "enhanced interrogation techniques" keep us safe — as Vice President Dick Cheney and others insist — or were they the product of simplistic minds that had seen too many episodes of "24"? Who was driving these decisions?

Obama has resisted appointing an independent commission to explore these questions. He should reconsider. Only a full airing of the issue can tell us how we strayed so far from our fundamental values, and more important, how we can do it right the next time.

REPRINTED FROM THE ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH.