Sadly, new and dismaying details continue to emerge of techniques engaged in by our government to combat terrorism and to interrogate alleged terrorists.

The depressing irony is that in what sometimes seemed like panicked efforts to fight back against those who threatened to attack the ideals of the United States, we came terrifyingly close to making a mockery of those ideas ourselves.

And sometimes, it seems, we did more than come close.

Details of a long-secret report that began to seep into the media late last week and were released on Monday would indicate that we trampled the boundaries of decency.

The reported abuses were not just in the name of responding to the devastating terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Some of the most sordid details involve the interrogation of Abd al Rahim al Nashiri, who was suspected of masterminding the attack on the U. S. destroyer Cole.

Nashiri's CIA interrogators reportedly brandished a power drill and a gun menacingly at him, and subjected him to the near-drowning method of waterboarding. In another instance, CIA questioners are said to have fired a gun in a room next to a detainee to lead him believe a colleague had been executed.

And the report, prepared in 2004 by the agency's inspector general, indicated that two senior al-Qaida operatives had been waterboarded 266 times - far more than the limited use of the technique presumed in the Justice Department's green-lighting of the technique. Even in limited use, the technique could be described as torture; when its application reached the hundreds, that judgment seems inescapable.

U.S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. is weighing whether to appoint a criminal prosecutor to investigate the charges. Republican critics maintain that prosecution has been rejected by earlier attorneys general and top Justice officials.

Their assertion is correct, but that does not mean the earlier decisions were the right ones. A criminal prosecutor may be needed to delve to the bottom of these grim charges.l