To the Senate and People of Rome: Pirates have attacked this strategic port city barely 20 miles from Rome itself. The consular war fleet has been destroyed. Senators Clintonia and McCainius have been kidnapped. The city is afire. These pirates are not in the pay of the sly Egyptians or Carthaginian dead-enders. The leader calls himself Binladenius.

The pirate raid on Ostia was the Roman equivalent of 9/11. Romans were utterly panicked. Pompey the Great saw this as an opportunity, and a flunky proposed a law under which he would be given absolute and unlimited power to save Rome from the terrorists. His cronies on talk forum stoked public fear. It was the Patriot Act of 68 B.C. and all of our president's signing statements (and then some) rolled into the Lex Gabinia.

Pompey emptied the Roman treasury for his war on terror and handily defeated the pirates. But his dictatorship was never rescinded. A few years later, Julius Caesar overthrew Pompey, retained his extraordinary powers, had himself declared emperor, and the rest is history. The republic of Rome disappeared. The eventual fall of Rome's empire began with that expensive trade of liberty for security.

In our own republic, last week was historic. Our imperial president finally confirmed to the world that yes, we do practice torture when it suits his purposes. We just pretend that it's "enhanced interrogation."

While the focus has been on waterboarding, that remnant from the Spanish Inquisition which every civilized nation (including ours until 2002) correctly considers to be torture, other "enhanced interrogation techniques" also include nudity and sexual humiliation; chaining naked prisoners in isolation cells where temperatures can be manipulated from 100 degrees down to 10 degrees, with periodic dousings of ice water; withholding food and water; withholding medical treatment; prolonged sleep deprivation; prolonged sensory deprivation; prolonged and excruciatingly painful stress positions; or combinations of any or all of these.

All of these "enhanced techniques" - torture to any reasonable person or jurist - have been practiced by agents of the U.S. government, whether in Afghanistan, Guantanamo, Iraq, or at CIA secret sites around the world. Like Pompey's Romans, we have been scared into assuming that these grotesqueries are necessary for our president to keep us safe. In truth, they only endanger us more. If these practices are not deemed by us to be torture, what claim do we have under international law or common morality to object when an enemy practices the very same torture upon our men and women who become prisoners? Why would al-Qaida agents ever defect if they expect to be tortured?

President Bush gave a remarkable interview recently to Fox News, in which he claimed that waterboarding was legal when it was used by the CIA in 2002 and 2003 against three al-Qaida operatives. That claim defies the state of the law. The United States charged and executed Japanese soldiers as war criminals after World War II for waterboarding prisoners. Waterboarding and other "enhanced interrogation" methods violate federal laws prohibiting torture, which were in place prior to George W. Bush taking office. To claim otherwise is false.

Then the president dug the hole deeper. "The American people have got to know that what we did in the past gained information that prevented an attack. And for those who criticize what we did, I ask them which attack they would have [permitted]?"

There is only one instance where torture has been linked by the administration to breaking up a terrorist plot: the foiled plan to hijack airliners over the Pacific Ocean. However, this plot was not foiled by anything Hakim Murad confessed under torture; all of the critical information came from his computer hard drive. The question remains: What attacks, exactly, have been stopped through torture?

The Bush administration simply refuses to answer that question, and a supine Congress does not demand an answer. Instead, people hide behind the canard that such information is classified and to reveal it would compromise sources and methods for gathering intelligence.

There's a fatal flaw in that claim. We already know what method, waterboarding, was used on three sources who supposedly confessed to other plots in progress. All of this happened more than six years ago. There is no possible harm which could now follow from fully explaining why the CIA's resort to barbarism was either necessary or useful. Produce the tapes or transcripts of those confessions.

President Bush wants to ensure that the CIA can continue to torture under his direction. Supposedly this is our only defense against the ticking bomb. That mantra makes some otherwise smart people turn off their powers of reason. What makes anyone infallibly sure that Mr. X knows all? Or, what if Mr. X, like one CIA-tortured, high-value prisoner, dies before revealing anything? Worse, what if Mr. X, or a hundred others like him, are innocent but still tortured out of their minds?

The real question, however, is this: What did the three (or more) waterboarded prisoners say that was worth the price we have paid to become a rogue nation in the eyes of the rest of the world? Torture by the CIA is still torture by Americans. Before making Pompey a dictator, the Roman Senate should have very carefully considered where the road from Ostia might really lead. So should our own.

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* DAVID IRVINE is a Salt Lake attorney residing in Bountiful. He was commissioned in the U.S. Army Reserve as a strategic intelligence officer in 1967 and retired as a brigadier general. He taught prisoner of war interrogation and military law for 18 years for the Sixth United States Army Intelligence School.