Agents who were following what they thought were legal orders when they waterboarded someone should not be prosecuted, the president has said repeatedly. As for anyone else—agents who went beyond their orders, the lawyers who wrote the legal briefs that purported to justify those orders, the officials (including President Bush) who sanctioned the techniques to begin with—Obama has been deliberately and increasingly vague about all of them. He doesn't want Congress to investigate; he doesn't want (though he may accept) an independent commission. Matters of prosecution and punishment, he now says, are up to Attorney General Eric Holder. Except, of course, that the language the president used was that "most" (which means presumably not all) of the decision making would be left to Holder.

For an administration that has prided itself on clarity of expression, it is all getting very confusing very fast. Today's briefing, which was supposed to focus on the administration's first 100 days, was dominated at the start by knotty questions about torture, torture memos, legal issues and the like. The senior official expressed frustration about this. The economy—not the recent history of interrogation techniques—is far and away the most important issue on the minds of voters, he insisted. Obama has done the most important thing, he argued, by banning the techniques in question. The American people, he said, want to look forward, and not dwell on issues of the past. On the left there is a lot of "pent-up energy," the official conceded, among opponents of the Iraq War, but that sentiment can be "very divisive and distracting" at a time when the Obama administration is trying to pass a budget and accomplish other domestic goals such as health-care reform.

But for many of Obama's supporters, there is no statute of limitations on the moral concerns that led them to support him in the first place. Under a generous interpretation, the Bush administration blundered out of ignorance and incompetence into choosing, using and justifying a technique—waterboarding—that by common global consensus has been considered torture ever since the days of the Spanish Inquisition. Its use is pretty clearly a violation of both U.S. law and the terms of an international treaty to which the U.S. is a signatory. In other words, the immorality of the practice has long since been codified into law. Neither U.S. nor international law, by the way, provides an excuse for agents who were following what they regarded to be lawful orders.

What is Obama's explanation for not strictly applying the law, American and international? It's not moral, it's practical: We need to move on; we have bigger, more urgent issues to face; we have the morale and potency of the CIA to protect as it tries to deal with treachery and terrorism. But none of that evokes or connects with the stirring moral vision with which Obama started his candidacy only a few years ago. Asked about Obama's philosophy of government, the official said that the president views himself as "a devout non-ideologue. He wants to do what works." And that is undoubtedly true. The problem is, he said something more when he launched his campaign.

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