All states must apply the law to all their citizens. Thus, the moral health of our country requires that Bush administration officials who may have used illegal interrogation methods be tried.

Advocating a hard-hitting investigation of top Bush Administration officials for torture is regarded as outside the realm of acceptable political discourse. While Attorney General Eric Holder is currently investigating any potential breaches of U.S. law through interrogation techniques, many legal experts believe this inquiry will be severely watered down.

To learn more about Holder’s investigation, I spoke to prolific constitutional lawyer and activist Glenn Greenwald. Greenwald, who focuses his writing on civil liberties issues, has been quoted twice on the Senate Floor for his research on the torture illegalities of the Bush administration. Greenwald said the Holder investigation was toothless.

“There’s not going to be any high level prosecutions,” he said flatly. Rather, the Justice Department’s investigation is concentrated on instances “where interrogators were particularly sadistic, going above and beyond the orders they were given. Instances where detainees were beaten to death or suffocated.”

Summing up the investigation, Greenwald said that despite media hype it “has nothing to do with [government-ordered] torture.”

But perhaps the reason torture isn’t being investigated is because it wasn’t ordered by the government. Though released memos have confirmed that waterboarding was implemented by the Bush administration, was this actually illegal?

There is considerable evidence for the illegality of waterboarding in the U.S. Waterboarding, defined by the Oxford University Press as “a form of torture in which the captive is made to believe he is suffocating to death under water,” which has been specifically prohibited by the Army Field Manual since September 2006. The United States also prosecuted and imprisoned a Japanese civilian for waterboarding U.S. prisoners of war in World War II.

The plethora of legal experts who believe waterboarding is illegal, as well as the historical precedent of the United States prosecuting waterboarding, make a strong case against the Bush Administration. It is a strong possibility that the orders given by the president and vice president were deeply criminal, and that possibility alone is sufficient justification for an investigation.

Arguing against a probe, Bush administration defenders point to a “ticking bomb” scenario as a moral justification for waterboarding. It is persuasive indeed to consider the possibility that such techniques “saved thousands of innocent lives,” as Dick Cheney recently asserted to a group of supporters.

But leaving aside the factually dubious nature of the former vice president’s assertion, the fact of the matter is that it’s legally irrelevant. As conservatives are ironically the first to remind us, “the law is the law.”

The state loses all of its credibility when its citizens regard its legal system as symbolic and circumstantial. The world may well be a better place if everyone followed St. Augustine’s admonition that “an unjust law is no law at all,” but in the meantime, the least the flawed status quo can do is consistently apply its rules to everyone.