The blame game is in full bray in Washington over enhanced interrogation techniques.

The Bush administration engaged in torture, claim the Democrats. Key Democrats, particularly House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, knew about the techniques and condoned them, respond the Republicans.

The CIA lied to Congress, Pelosi complains. Did not, retorts the Obama administration's CIA Director Leon Panetta.

The Obama administration throws fuel on the fire by releasing legal memoranda by Bush lawyers approving the use of the techniques. The Democratic narrative is that the memos constitute a permission slip for the CIA to torture detainees. A reading of the memos doesn't sustain that assertion.

The memos provide a thorough parsing of the specific language in the law banning torture. They conclude that the techniques don't meet the legal definition because severe pain was not to be inflicted and the techniques weren't expected to cause prolonged mental harm.

Far from an anything-goes approach, the memos parse nuances that only lawyers could fixate on. The CIA wanted to put an insect in a confined space of one detainee who was afraid of them. That could be done, the Bush lawyer opined, only if the detainee was told that the insect didn't have a stinger and wasn't dangerous. Or, the CIA could put the insect in the cell without saying anything. But the CIA couldn't intimate that the insect posed any risk to the detainee at all.

There is also a hot debate about whether the interrogation techniques worked. Former Vice President Dick Cheney claims they prevented additional attacks. He is backed up by former CIA Directors George Tenet and Michael Hayden. Lower-ranking officials have disputed this. And it may be questioned in a CIA Inspector General's report that remains largely classified.

The political problem for Democrats is that the American people probably aren't with them.

What the CIA did was unseemly. In our name, the CIA took other human beings and slapped them, stripped them, slammed them into false walls, doused them with cold water, confined them in small spaces for up to eight hours, deprived them of sleep for up to a week, and repeatedly made them sense that they were drowning.

We like to think we are a better people than that.

But these techniques weren't used willy-nilly. They were used on only about 30 detainees; waterboarding on only three. And if they produced information that prevented terrorist attacks, the attitude of the overwhelming majority of the American people would likely be: Sometimes you have to do what you have to do.

And that's why what the American people need at this point isn't the blame game, but a dispassionate, independent accounting of what was done and what was produced.

This isn't the "truth commission" Democrats are calling for. Democrats want show trials for Bush officials, with a condemnatory report and possible prosecutorial referrals.

Instead, what is needed is a fact-finding commission, ideally consisting of former judges, that would do its work in private and just issue a public report.

The commission would not try to render a legal judgment as to whether the techniques constitute torture. It wouldn't try to ascertain when which members of Congress knew what.

Instead, it would limit itself to determining, and making public, what standard interrogation techniques were used on these detainees for how long, and what information was yielded. Then, what enhanced techniques were used and what additional information was acquired.

Although a classified version would probably be necessary, at this point there's no reason that most of the information shouldn't be public. The Obama administration has already released the techniques that were used. The question is whether they were necessary and effective.

The sad and disturbing fact is that no one in Washington can be trusted to appoint such a neutral fact-finding commission. The Obama administration hardly wants a commission that might indicate that techniques it has disavowed saved American lives. And members of Congress in both parties are more interested in witch-hunts than fact-finding.

So, a braying blame game is what we are likely to continue to get.