Read this slowly: Dick Cheney is asking the U.S. government to make public some of its most tightly held secrets.

That's Dick Cheney, George W. Bush's vice-president. The man who installed eight-year time locks on the doors of American government and then disappeared behind them with a big stamp marked "Classified."

In fact, Cheney himself once argued that declassification of the very documents he now seeks would damage national security.

Former vice-president Dick Cheney, seen here in a television interview in March 2009, has been leading the fight against re-opening the torture debate. (Associated Press)

But the former deputy chief executive is caught up in something that supersedes even his preternatural obsession with secrecy.

With the recent release of the so-called torture memos from the Bush years, Americans are having a spectacular argument about something many would rather not discuss in the first place, a subject that threatens one of this country's founding beliefs: the near-religious conviction that this is a unique nation, built on higher moral ground.

Facing off

Cheney, along with a group of like-minded conservatives, is leading one side. President Barack Obama has placed his White House and his own party on the other.

In mid-April, the president stunned everyone by making public 124 pages of top secret government memos laying out the Bush administration's legal justifications for torturing detainees captured in what it called the war on terror.

In releasing the documents, Obama actually overruled his own intelligence chief, declaring that America was "losing its moral bearings" and that the public has a right to know what happened.

For him, declassifying these documents and banning torture in the future was an act of finality. He made his announcements, then said he wanted to "look forward, not back."

But if that's what Obama truly expected, he still has something to learn about how the American mind works. The documents, posted on the internet, had the opposite effect.

'Enhanced interrogation'

Written in the stolid, banal hand of government lawyers, the torture memos go into such hair-splitting — and hair-raising — detail, parsing words like "severe" and "pain" so minutely that they obscure the enormity of what they are actually discussing: controlled drownings, beatings, the collaring and slamming of imprisoned men into walls, sleep deprivation for up to eleven days at a time, sustained nude exposure to cold, and confinement in cramped boxes, to name six of the 10 approved techniques.

Predictably, the Bush administration lawyers concluded that none of those activities were torture and settled instead on the ghastly euphemism "enhanced interrogation techniques."

Even when detainees were "waterboarded" — in one case more than 180 times in a single month, using precisely the same techniques as Pol Pot's infamous Khmer Rouge and the Japanese interrogators who were hanged by the U.S. for war crimes after the Second World War — it wasn't considered torture.

Even when some detainees were killed, it wasn't considered torture.

To cite but one example of the reasoning in the memos: "Although the waterboard constitutes a threat of imminent death, prolonged mental harm must nonetheless result to violate the statutory prohibition of infliction of severe mental pain or suffering."

The genie's escaped

Recent polling suggests most Americans wish Obama hadn't declassified the memos. But, to their credit, they are ignoring his invitation to look simply forward.

Respected opinion leaders began comparing the meticulous legal justifications and the bland euphemisms in the memos to the logic of monstrous regimes from the past. In the process, they joined arms with human rights activists who had been pushing for release of the memos for years.

Eric Holder, Obama's attorney-general, flatly described waterboarding as torture.

Senior congressional leaders from both parties who, it turns out, had been briefed all along on what the CIA was doing, ran for cover.

Powerful people like Republican congressman John Boehner, as well as some (usually) conservative columnists, began using the word "torture" publicly.

Even television news anchors, cowed until now by the Bush administration and a public that didn't want to hear about America and torture in the same sentence, began uttering the word without attribution.

Immunity?

As the debate escalated, it emerged that not everyone went along. The FBI, it turns out, refused to participate in torture and banned its agents from the "enhanced" sessions.

Senior military officers also expressed their disgust, only to have their objections overruled by higher powers.

Now, a cry is rising for the prosecution of everyone involved.

Obama, determined to keep looking forward, had assured the CIA agents who actually did the torturing that they wouldn't face charges.

"It is our intention," he said, "to assure those who, carrying out their duties relying in good faith upon the legal advice from the Department of Justice, that they will not be subject to prosecution."

In other words, it might have been torture, but they were just following orders, a defence that's failed for agents of other regimes, most notably the Nazis.

Obama, however, says there will be no automatic immunity for the officials who ordered and authored the torture memos, one of whom is now a federal judge.

And in Congress, support is building for some sort of public truth commission.

An unstoppable debate

To the Cheney crowd, this whole sunshine-as-disinfectant approach is nearly treasonous.

The former vice-president went on TV to denounce Obama for making the nation less safe. Former Bush strategist Karl Rove wrote that the release of the memos "helped our enemies tremendously." The former president's speechwriter Marc Thiessen insisted that the "enhanced interrogation techniques" were entirely appropriate.

The CIA interrogators, Thiessen declared in a radio talk show, "are not torturers. They're heroes. And the thought that we're sitting here discussing whether these people should be prosecuted or investigated is just outrageous."

The Cheney group argues the interrogations extracted information that saved lives, which is why he wants certain other memos declassified. They will, says the former vice-president, demonstrate that conclusively.

But will that be the case?

A Pentagon agency advised Bush's officials years ago that physical abuse (notably, the agency used the word "torture") doesn't yield reliable information, and no less an authority figure than Robert Mueller, Bush's FBI director, has said publicly he knows of no terrorist plots that were foiled.

Ultimately, Cheney and his supporters are arguing that the end justifies the means, which is a debate that makes a good many Americans cringe. Still, the discussion Obama ignited appears unstoppable.

Soon, bending to legal challenges from human rights groups, the administration intends to release pictures of prisoner abuse — the same sort of incendiary photos that surfaced from Abu Ghraib prison.

Meanwhile, torture opponents now want the government to release not only the documents Dick Cheney is seeking to justify his contentions, but all the documents pertaining to the torture program.

Let the public decide, they say.

No journalist can argue with this, particularly no journalist from Canada where embarrassing secrets are routinely locked up for 25 years; in Britain, it can be more like 50.

In this country, there really is freedom of information, not freedom from information.

It is a gloriously American argument. And a grand thing to watch.