The XX Factor: What women really think.

We Tortured. We Pretended Otherwise.

The Justice Department has finally released four long-awaited torture memos. I've read one of them so far, the Aug. 1, 2002 memo (by then-Office of Legal Counsel lawyer Steven Bradbury. (Correction: OLC lawyer Jay Bybee wrote the 2002 memo. Bradbury wrote three additional memos in 2005.) I understand why the CIA and Bush officials fought hard against its release.

The memo is chilling for the pain and violence it portrays, and more than that for its efforts to minimize that pain and violence so as to make believe that it did not amount to torture and thus wasn't outlawed by the Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture—treaties that bind the United States (except that obviously they do not). Bradbury recounts 10 techniques interrogators wanted to use against Abu Zubaydah, a high-value detainee they were confident they'd extract big al-Qaida information from. Water-boarding is among them. So is "walling," which means slamming a man's head against a wall while he's wearing a collar so he won't be brain dead from whiplash. Also sleep deprivation and shutting Zubaydah into a small box with an insect, which he'd be made to believe would sting. (The interrogators thought he had a particular insect phobia.)

According to Bradbury's analysis, these techniques are just no big deal. Really? Eleven days of sleep deprivation, the max the CIA asked for? No worries, a night or two of rest and you're back to normal. This is not what historians write about torture. And so the memo doesn't cite them. Instead it relies on officials from the military's SERE school, which teaches resistance to torture, and on stats showing that most SERE students don't actually lose their minds.

Down to many of the last details, the memos confirm the Red Cross report on the experience of Zubaydah and 13 other high-value detainees, made public last month by journalist Mark Danner. And they show us for the first time exactly how the Bush OLC lawyers played doctor and psychiatrist to wave away the reality of what they gave legal approval for. President Obama released the memos today with a promise not to prosecute anyone in the government who relied on them. That was inevitable. It may also be fair. But it won't be the last word. Whether by truth commission or congressional committee, there are more skeletons to be pulled from the government's closets, and much more thinking about them to do, once we can see them.