not asked of Obama Sunday night on 60 Minutes which would tell anyone else out there what needs to be known (not that we haven't already figured it out):

"Is waterboarding torture?"

A now-deceased lawyer friend used to do products liability lawsuits.  In such cases, the defense would invariably present some flavor of products engineer who would testify as an expert that the product was not defective.  My late colleague's lead deposition question for the proposed  defense expert was really simple:  "Which is more important - safety or profit?"

Note that it was not a "when did you stop beating your wife" question.  Nope.  Far more subtle.  The follow up to a "profit" answer was along the lines of "So, how much profit is an eye (or arm or leg or whatever) worth, particularly when a guard (or warning or whatever) would cost another nickel per unit produced?"

The follow up to a "safety" answer was "Guess your client failed, 'cause the plaintiff was injured".

In this case, if Obama answers "yes", then his resistance to prosecuting torturers runs directly counter to his proclamation about "we don't" and it also runs directly counter to his upcoming oath.  Not only that, but "we don't want to look back" also creates a nice defense argument for every criminal accused of anything.

If Obama answers "no", then he accepts Bush's definition and there goes the "Change we can believe in".

If he tries anything other then "yes" or "no", he sounds like Bush parsing and tapdancing.

One time, in trying a products case alongside my departed colleague (he represented an injured kid and I was defending the kid's parent, whom the company had tried to blame for the kid's injuries), he led off with Question One.  That proposed expert held forth for close to 10 minutes, playing with "profit" and "safety", going back and forth.

At one point, he answered "profit" and at another he answered "safety".  We just sat there and watched him fill pages of transcript.

He wound up looking like a fool and, being relatively new to the business, actually seemed embarrassed about it.  We won the case.

I have no doubts about how Obama would answer the question, and it wouldn't be pretty.