The Obama grandstanding tour took a domestic turn with his release of four highly classified Justice Department legal opinions about interrogation. The political point of their release was to signal the end of “a dark and painful chapter in our history,” as President Obama put it — See, we’re not like those lawless Bushies.

There’s a cost to this preening. Foreign intelligence services will rethink cooperating with us, knowing how bad we are at keeping secrets. Obama’s relationship with the intelligence community will be strained. And al-Qaeda now knows important details of the CIA’s controversial enhanced-interrogation program and will doubtless move to prepare future operatives to resist these techniques, should we ever feel the need to resort to them again.

The memos tell a different story from the one the Obama administration and the press are pushing. Detailed and carefully reasoned, they make it clear that neither the CIA nor the Justice Department was trying to “define torture down,” but were instead determined to locate and avoid crossing the legal line at which coercive interrogation becomes torture. Congress itself has not drawn this line with great clarity. The memos discuss a number of harsh interrogation methods, but these were carefully circumscribed and monitored so as not to inflict the “severe physical or mental pain or suffering” that would constitute torture.

The memos confirm that these techniques came out of the U.S. Military’s own “Survival Evasion Resistance Escape” (SERE) training programs. This is important for two reasons. First, it shows that Congress was fully aware that these types of techniques had been used thousands of times in the past — on U.S. service members. Second, and more important, the SERE training program produced years’ worth of data about how individuals react, physically and mentally, to various interrogation methods. From 1992 to 2001, more than 26,000 were SERE-trained. Of these, only 0.14 percent were removed from the program for psychological reasons.

As the Justice Department acknowledges in its memos, training exercises are obviously not identical to live interrogations. Detainees such as Khalid Sheik Muhammed faced a more intense and extensive application of these methods than any trainee. Nevertheless, so many years of experience certainly permitted the CIA to project the likely impact of the proposed interrogation methods on detainees and to calibrate them to stay within the law. None of this could have been lost on senior members of Congress, in the leadership and on the intelligence committees, who were repeatedly briefed about the enhanced-interrogation program and who encouraged the CIA to make sure they were doing what needed to be done to prevent a reprise of 9/11.

The memos strike some observers as overly legalistic, discussing tough techniques in lawyerly prose. But this uncomfortable juxtaposition is unavoidable. The CIA and the Justice Department were faced with the need to balance competing imperatives — to protect American lives by preventing future attacks on civilians, and to honor the traditional U.S. practice of treating wartime captives humanely and within the boundaries of the law. It is only with the memory of 9/11 fading that trying to strike this balance could in itself be considered a nefarious act.

Many critics of enhanced interrogation say that there is no balance to be struck, that coercive interrogation “never works.” As it happens, the CIA “effectiveness memo” detailing the benefits of the harsher techniques hasn’t been released, although it was referred to repeatedly in the legal memos. Former Vice President Dick Cheney has called for the de-classification of documents describing the kind of information gained from enhanced interrogation, and he’s right. The debate over interrogation shouldn’t be unfairly tilted by selective, politically motivated disclosures.

But it’s hard to believe that Obama is interested in a fair-minded debate. Already he is showing signs of caving to the yowling Left on this issue, leaving open the possibility of prosecutions of the authors of the memos after repeatedly saying he’s interested only in looking ahead. It’s not hard to see the predicate here for the creation of a Church Committee–style inquisition that will chasten U.S. intelligence for decades.

The release of the memos alone will serve to reinforce an ethos of timidity and inaction in the intelligence community. The message to agents asked to do dangerous things to keep our country safe is: “Even if you have a presidential assurance, legal license from the Department of Justice, and encouragement from the congressional intelligence committees, you may not be safe a month from now, a year from now, or whenever the climate of threat changes or power changes hands.” It’s probably what those agents suspected all along, even as they acted, regardless, out of a sense of duty. Now they know.