President Obama said he will not prosecute the CIA employees who used water boarding and other "tough" tactics to interrogate subjects about the war on terror. But he also said the Justice department has a separate investigation into the lawyers who wrote the opinions that such behavior was OK.

Senator John McCain said this investigation into the lawyers was improper.

Well, you're wrong John McCain!

The U.S Department of Justice needs to investigate these lawyers for evil doing.

Let me explain by comparing an example.

Suppose a lawyer was advising a gangster boss.

And suppose the lawyer said, "You won't be convicted if the daughter of the next door neighbor of juror 10 was raped and beaten."

And suppose the little girl is beaten and raped that very day.

That lawyer deserves to be investigated and prosecuted for his advice. The protection of client confidentiality should not apply. And the lawyer should be sent to a longer prison term than the gangster gets.

Because the lawyer knew what kind of person the gangster was.

The lawyer also knew what the likely consequences of his advice were. And he knew it was improper to give this kind of advice to any client or hold an idle conversation with the kind of person his client was.

Now what about torture?

I may not be able to enumerate all the kinds of actions which qualify as torture, but I know it when it feels like torture.

The KGB used to strap subjects into a chair and spin them around inside a room painted in weird stripes and spots room until they puked. That's torture.

The Chinese used to require subjects to spend endless hours writing and rewriting their autobiographies until they contained exactly the right slant of confession and wrongdoing. That's torture.

The CIA sets dogs on prisoners and pours water over their faces until they talk. That's torture.

I don't think any of these actions are strictly prohibited by international torture agreements, but they are still torture.

That's why the lawyers who said these behaviors were permitted should be prosecuted and properly punished.

Who in the United States, who in the world, does not know the CIA has thugs and sadists working for them. This is not to say that all CIA staff are thugs or sadists, but some are known to work for them.

Advising these thugs that sadistic or thuggish behavior is permissible is like saying it would give a gangster a free pass if a certain little girl were raped.

The thugs and the sadists who work for the CIA took advantage of the opinions of the lawyers and perverted them to their own ends.

Good people, knowledgeable interrogators, and impartial observers who work at the CIA and raised objections to these methods were silenced by threats towards themselves, their friends, and their careers. "Who is not on board with the war to stop terror? You are, aren't you?"

And of course the racist, "Nothing else works with these people," statement is never far away from the lips of "tough" interrogators.

The widely published opinions of Bush administration lawyers that these behaviors were permissible worked to silence objections like no other action could. (Let me say that I know the military still objected in private through channels and in public that these interrogation procedures were improper. This just goes to show the courage of the American soldier in the face of evil.)

Good people everywhere, even inside the CIA, always object to torture. But thugs take advantage of lawyers' opinions no matter where they work.

That is why the lawyers who gave opinions to the Bush administration that "tough" tactics were OK would be investigated and prosecuted.