-- "The Future" by Leonard Cohen, 1992

Every atrocity comes with a lawyer whose regard for the rule of law may be suspect, but whose fealty to the cynical politics of the moment is always unquestioned.

Think about it: Pontius Pilate would have been just another weak-kneed equivocator if not for the Sadducees whispering in his ear about a Galilean malcontent's need to be strung up by sundown.

The Spanish Inquisition had a thousand years of anti-Semitism and hundreds of years of anti-Muslim sentiment to draw on for legal precedent.

And wasn't it European lawyers who negotiated the purchase price with vengeful African tribes for the souls who filled the cargo holds of ships bound for slavery in the New World?

There are exceptions, of course. Good and ethical lawyers -- as in those unwilling to rubber stamp the never-ending folly of political elites -- have occasionally made their mark on history.

Alas, John Yoo, former deputy counsel in the Bush Justice Department, isn't one of them.

Mr. Yoo authored both the notorious 2002 and 2003 "torture memos" that the Bush administration used to justify its harsh interrogation of al-Qaida prisoners and suspects at Guantanamo Bay. He's now a law professor at the University of California-Berkeley, of all places.

In a nutshell, the 81-page document dated March 14, 2003, eliminated constitutional checks on President Bush's wartime authority overseas.

Mr. Yoo's memo explicitly removed Mr. Bush -- and the CIA -- from the indignity of submitting to the authority of the Geneva Conventions and other quaint international treaties that opposed the president's prerogative to torture when he sees fit during wartime.

The morality of the memo pivoted on a novel interpretation of torture that scaled new heights of sophistry: as long as it wasn't the interrogator's "intent" to torture the captive, then it wasn't torture.

And even if it was torture by some narrow and unenlightened definition that didn't embrace the American understanding of the term, well, it still wasn't a violation of international law because the law doesn't apply to American presidents and their surrogates.

If you listened closely enough, you could almost hear Nietzsche's lunatic running through the village at noon with his lantern blazing, proclaiming the death of God and the birth of an imperial presidency far beyond the standards of good and evil.

Mr. Yoo's memo would eventually provide -- for lack of a better term -- the "moral" template for the inhumanity unleashed at Abu Ghraib by those "farther down the chain of command" in Iraq.

"The memo released [on April 1] does not apply to Iraq," Mr. Yoo told Esquire in an exclusive interview that appeared on its Web site last week. "There was no intention or desire that the memo released yesterday apply to Iraq."

Darn. Somebody should have told the chain of command that stretched from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to the sadistic grunts working the night shift at Abu Ghraib that the green light for torture only applied to the professional sadists at the CIA.

The memo was eventually rescinded in late 2003, possibly because it was the kind of smoking gun that even the ideologues of the Bush administration knew would be embarrassing if it surfaced after American democracy was restored.

But that cliche about the silliness of closing the barn door after the horses get out has never been truer.

Last week, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by the American Civil Liberties Union, Mr. Yoo's memo was declassified.

The reaction in much of the mainstream media alternated between "just the facts ma'am"-level reporting and total indifference.

Still, it's hard to criticize news media for the dearth of serious coverage about a torture memo with so many weighty matters like a "pregnant man" on "Oprah" and Sen. Barack Obama's lousy performance at an Altoona bowling alley as distractions.

Someday, if we're lucky, we'll look back on the bread and circuses of this era with something approaching the cleansing power of retroactive shame.