AT least since Watergate, Americans have come to take for  granted a certain story line of scandal, in which  revelation is followed by investigation, adjudication and  expiation. Together, Congress and the courts investigate  high-level wrongdoing and place it in a carefully  constructed narrative, in which crimes are charted,  malfeasance is explicated and punishment is apportioned as  the final step in the journey back to order, justice and  propriety. 

 When Alberto Gonzales takes his seat before the Senate  Judiciary Committee today for hearings to confirm whether  he will become attorney general of the United States,  Americans will bid farewell to that comforting story line.  The senators are likely to give full legitimacy to a path  that the Bush administration set the country on more than  three years ago, a path that has transformed the United  States from a country that condemned torture and forbade  its use to one that practices torture routinely. Through a  process of redefinition largely overseen by Mr. Gonzales  himself, a practice that was once a clear and abhorrent  violation of the law has become in effect the law of the  land. 

 Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, Americans began torturing  prisoners, and they have never really stopped. However much  these words have about them the ring of accusation, they  must by now be accepted as fact. From Red Cross reports,  Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba's inquiry, James R.  Schlesinger's Pentagon-sanctioned commission and other  government and independent investigations, we have in our  possession hundreds of accounts of "cruel, inhuman and  degrading" treatment - to use a phrase of the Red Cross -  "tantamount to torture." 

 So far as we know, American intelligence officers,  determined after Sept. 11 to "take the gloves off," began  by torturing Qaeda prisoners. They used a number of  techniques: "water-boarding," in which a prisoner is  stripped, shackled and submerged in water until he begins  to lose consciousness, and other forms of near suffocation;  sleep and sensory deprivation; heat and light and dietary  manipulation; and "stress positions." 

 Eventually, these practices "migrated," in the words of the  Schlesinger report, to Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where for  a time last spring the marvel of digital technology allowed  Americans to see what their soldiers were doing to  prisoners in their name. 

 Though the revelations of Abu Ghraib transfixed Americans  for a time, in the matter of torture not much changed.  After those in Congress had offered condemnations and a few  hearings distinguished by their lack of seriousness; after  the administration had commenced the requisite half-dozen  investigations, none of them empowered to touch those who  devised the policies; and after the low-level soldiers were  placed firmly on the road to punishment - after all this,  the issue of torture slipped back beneath the surface.  Every few weeks now, a word or two reaches us from that  dark, subterranean place. Take, for example, this account,  offered by an unnamed F.B.I. counterterrorism official  reporting in August, more than three months after the Abu  Ghraib images appeared, on what he saw during a visit to  Guantánamo: 

 "On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to  find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position  to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they  had urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left  there for 18-24 hours or more...When I asked the M.P.'s  what was going on, I was told that interrogators from the  day prior had ordered this treatment, and the detainee was  not to be moved. On another occasion...the detainee was  almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next  to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his own  hair out throughout the night." 

 This is a fairly mild example when judged against the  accounts of the "abuses" that have entered the public  record. I put quotation marks around the word "abuses"  because most of these acts - as the F.B.I. agent  acknowledged ("the interrogators from the day prior had  ordered this treatment") - were in fact procedures, which  would not have been possible without policies that had been  approved by administration officials. 

 In the next few days we are likely to hear how Mr. Gonzales  recommended strongly, against the arguments of the  secretary of state and military lawyers, that prisoners in  Afghanistan be denied the protection of the Geneva  Conventions. We are also likely to hear how, under Mr.  Gonzales's urging, lawyers in the Department of Justice  contrived - when confronted with the obstacle that the  United States had undertaken, by treaty and statute, to  make torture illegal - simply to redefine the word to mean  procedures that would produce pain "of an intensity akin to  that which accompanies serious physical injury such as  death or organ failure." By this act of verbal legerdemain,  interrogation techniques like water-boarding that plainly  constituted torture suddenly became something less than  that. 

 But what we are unlikely to hear, given the balance of  votes in the Senate, are many voices making the obvious  argument that with this record, Mr. Gonzales is unfit to  serve as attorney general. So let me make it: Mr. Gonzales  is unfit because the slow river of litigation is certain to  bring before the next attorney general a raft of torture  cases that challenge the very policies that he personally  helped devise and put into practice. He is unfit because,  while the attorney general is charged with upholding the  law, the documents show that as White House counsel, Mr.  Gonzales, in the matter of torture, helped his client to  concoct strategies to circumvent it. And he is unfit,  finally, because he has rightly become the symbol of the  United States' fateful departure from a body of settled  international law and human rights practice for which the  country claims to stand. 

 On the other hand, perhaps it is fitting that Mr. Gonzales  be confirmed. The system of torture has, after all,  survived its disclosure. We have entered a new era; the  traditional story line in which scandal leads to  investigation and investigation leads to punishment has  been supplanted by something else. Wrongdoing is still  exposed; we gaze at the photographs and read the documents,  and then we listen to the president's spokesman  "reiterate," as he did last week, "the president's  determination that the United States never engage in  torture." And there the story ends. 

 At present, our government, controlled largely by one party  only intermittently harried by a timorous opposition, is  unable to mete out punishment or change policy, let alone  adequately investigate its own war crimes. And, as  administration officials clearly expect, and senators of  both parties well understand, most Americans - the  Americans who will not read the reports, who will soon  forget the photographs and who will be loath to dwell on a  repellent subject - are generally content to take the  president at his word. 

 But reality has a way of asserting itself. In the end, as  Gen. Joseph P. Hoar pointed out this week, the  administration's decision on the Geneva Conventions "puts  all American servicemen and women at risk that are serving  in combat regions." For General Hoar - a retired commander  of American forces in the Middle East and one of a dozen  prominent retired generals and admirals to oppose Mr.  Gonzales - torture has a way of undermining the forces  using it, as it did with the French Army in Algeria. 

 The general's concerns are understandable. The war in Iraq  and the war on terrorism are ultimately political in  character. Victory depends in the end not on technology or  on overwhelming force but on political persuasion. By using  torture, the country relinquishes the very ideological  advantage - the promotion of democracy, freedom and human  rights - that the president has so persistently claimed is  America's most powerful weapon in defeating Islamic  extremism. One does not reach democracy, or freedom,  through torture. 

 By using torture, we Americans transform ourselves into the  very caricature our enemies have sought to make of us.  True, that miserable man who pulled out his hair as he lay  on the floor at Guantánamo may eventually tell his  interrogators what he knows, or what they want to hear. But  for America, torture is self-defeating; for a strong  country it is in the end a strategy of weakness. After Mr.  Gonzales is confirmed, the road back - to justice, order  and propriety - will be very long. Torture will belong to  us all. 

 Mark Danner is the author of "Torture and Truth: America,  Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror." 
  http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/06/opinion/06danner.html?ex=1106048145&ei=1&en=03b464fc545b  4d38