Is waterboarding torture? Of course it is, say Attorney General Eric Holder and many others who have confidently declared that the Bush administration's lawyers were clearly wrong to approve as legal the CIA's proposed use of waterboarding and nine other brutal interrogation methods.

I agree that waterboarding is torture as colloquially understood by many of us and that it should be banned.

But that does not mean that the CIA's proposal -- eventually endorsed by officials up to and including Present Bush -- was illegal under the extremely narrow definition of "torture" that Congress wrote in 1994 when it made the practice a federal crime.

Indeed, the recently released report by Associate Deputy Attorney General David Margolis, the senior Justice Department expert on legal ethics, implicitly contradicts the strikingly superficial analysis underlying Holder's assertions that waterboarding is illegal torture.

And while Margolis did not directly rule on the legality of the CIA's interrogation methods, his 69-page analysis more strongly supports the view that the kind of waterboarding that the agency proposed in 2002 was not illegal torture.

You would hardly guess this from the media coverage after Justice released the Margolis report and related documents on February 19.

The report's central conclusion absolved Jay Bybee and John Yoo -- the Bush-appointed Justice Department lawyers who prepared two key "torture memos," both dated August 1, 2002 -- of unethical conduct. Margolis firmly rejected a pervasively slanted, and unethically leaked, effort by Holder protégés in the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility to subject Bybee and Yoo to discipline from the bar. (The OPR is not to be confused with the Office of Legal Counsel, known as the OLC, which Bybee headed in 2002 with Yoo as a deputy.)