The conversation about torture we should have had 10 years ago.

This weekend, I had the privilege of moderating a discussion about law and the war on terror hosted by the Aspen Security Forum in Aspen, Colo. The participants were: Bill Bratton, former chief of the Los Angeles Police Department and former commissioner of the New York Police Department; professor David Cole of the Georgetown University Law Center; Alberto Gonzales, former attorney general of the United States and White House counsel; Anthony Romero, the executive director of the ACLU; and Professor John Yoo, former deputy assistant attorney general at the Office of Legal Counsel.

Today, on the ninth anniversary of one of the so-called "torture memos," the need for a conversation about law, terror, and accountability in open, public debates is as urgent as it ever was. Maybe even more so. I urge you to watch the panel in its entirety. Below I have excerpted and edited key portions. Transcription errors are all my own.

Gonzales: "I believe it's important for the most powerful person in the world, the president of the United States, to be constrained by some rules, and, as lawyers, what we endeavor to do is provide to the president the box in which he can operate. As a policy-maker, he would decide how close to the edge of the box he could get, but what he expected of the lawyers and … John Yoo in the Department of Justice, was to define that box for the president. …

"I thought it important for the president to have as many options as possible. I thought it important to have the criminal justice system available to deal with people who were captured and that we have the military justice system available as well. Now there were some in the administration who believed everyone involved in terrorism should be dealt with through military commissions and detained indefinitely. I wasn't of that mindset. I believed our criminal justice system was available and appropriate to bring people to justice."

Romero: "There is no greater threat to securing the homeland than America's willing abdication of her moral authority at home and abroad, and the utter lawlessness of the Bush years, beginning with the surveillance of American citizens without congressional approval or the review of the judiciary; the detention of American citizens without charges or trial, apprehended on American soil as enemy combatants; the establishment of black sites, where torture was committed—not enhanced interrogation techniques, not these lovely little euphemisms for that which is unconstitutional, illegal, and war crimes; and the absence of ensuring accountability for crimes committed by Americans and authorized at the highest level of our government. And that breakdown of the rule of law is equivalent to the meltdown of the financial system. The complete legal system turned on its head. Boxes were broken. Rules were changed. …

"There is no greater set of conversations that needs to be had; this is a set of issues that is too often done behind closed doors among reified parts of the American government ... and perhaps the most important thing we can do is break open this conversation ... and thrash out these issues openly ... about the country we want to live in. …

"I think the Obama administration also deserves to be called on the carpet for its unwillingness to take on these issues with the seriousness they deserve. ... This president has come too short, too little, often too late. ... That effort of putting one's head in the sand and the effort to push forward will only mire us in the past."

Yoo: "I don't think the biggest threat to American security is a claim that there is some kind of lawlessness or broad unconstitutionality going on here. ... The ACLU has blurred the rules of war and made it seem like the rules of war are seeping into the domestic system, that a separate body of ways to act against an enemy are being transplanted into the American political, domestic system. ... I don't think that there has been any huge disorder or disruption or pulling back on civil liberties for Americans in the United States. ... Ask yourselves, have civil liberties really declined in any significant way in the country? …

"I think that because of people's unfamiliarity with the rules of war, rather than the normal police rules ... and when they see the rules of war—when they see that you can have detention without trial in wartime, they think it's a violation of civil liberties. …

"If you were really worried about civil liberties, you would be jumping up and down yelling and screaming about targeted drone killings just as much as, if not more than, what I do prefer to call aggressive or coercive interrogation and not torture. Because in drone killings, we are not just putting pressure on people to give us information about where Osama Bin Laden is; we are killing them. We are depriving them of their fundamental human right, which is to be alive. ... I don't see the civil liberties crowd or the media jumping up and down claiming that we are engaging in massive human rights deprivations even though this administration has ... killed way more people using drones than were ever water-boarded by the Bush administration. I think the figure the CIA guys gave yesterday was three people."

Cole: "The rule of law is actually much more resilient than many cynics thought and many people would have predicted on 9/11. ... On 9/11, had you said to somebody that the United States is not going to get away with doing whatever it wants to respond to this attack, you would have been laughed at. Who was going to stop us? ... I think that is actually the mindset that unfortunately operated. I don't see much of a box that John Yoo or Alberto Gonzales created for the president, unless the box has infinite lines. Alberto Gonzales said the Geneva Conventions are quaint, obsolete, irrelevant, and don't apply. John Yoo said that law doesn't apply when the president is acting as commander in chief. As commander in chief he can ignore the fact that Congress has made it a crime to commit torture. He can ignore the fact that Congress has made it a crime to wiretap people without judicial approval. ... Where is the box? If international law doesn't bind, if constitutional law doesn't bind, if the president is able to do whatever he wants?

"But on each one of those measures, the Bush administration was forced to retreat once these policies became public ... and the rule of law reasserted itself, and so the second part of the Bush administration was much more consistent with the rule of law than the first part of the Bush administration. The Obama administration came in and further asserted the force of the rule of law, banning torture, closing the CIA black sites, releasing the torture memos, insisting the fight against al-Qaida must be fought within the rule of law and not in spite of the rule of law."

Gonzales: "The concerns we are seeing about criminal trials in New York City are based upon specific circumstances. I think it's wrong to say that criminal trials for all terrorists are off the table. We know the [Justice] Department is capable of prosecuting terrorists in our criminal-justice system. …