It appears that the Torture Caucus in Congress will win the day and pass a bill that legalizes particular extreme interrogation techniques such as waterboarding, also known as torture. There is no doubt Pres. Bush will sign the torture bill into law.

But the men and women on the frontline of the Bush Administration’s interrogation of terrorist suspects might do well to look at our country’s history when it comes to torture. What they’ll find is that even when it is tolerated in the heat of the moment, torture is not a natural element of the American psyche. Those who engage in torture under the banner of the United States flag — even with the approval of those higher up in the chain of command — can find themselves treated harshly within a matter of months.

We have seen this recently in the way the military underlings who abused prisoners at Abu Grahib were sent to jail. But there is an even more extreme case in our history. Look what happened to Henry Wirz, the commander of a prison operated by the Confederate government in Andersonville, Georgia, where torture and much, much worse happened during the Civil War:

After the end of hostilities, Wirz was arrested by a contingent of federal cavalry and taken by rail to Washington, D.C., where the federal government intended to place him on trial for conspiring to impair the lives of Union prisoners of war.

In July 1865, the trial convened in the Capitol building and lasted two months, dominating the front pages of newspapers across the United States. The court heard the testimony of former inmates, ex-Confederate officers and even nearby residents of Andersonville. Finally, in early November, the commission announced that it had found Wirz guilty of conspiracy as charged and of eleven of thirteen counts of murder. He was sentenced to death.

In a letter to President Andrew Johnson, Wirz asked for mercy, but the letter went unanswered. Mounting the scaffold on the morning of November 10, 1865, Wirz asserted that he was being hanged for following orders. He was executed on the same site where the Lincoln conspirators met their own fate just several months before, within clear sight of the newly-built dome of the U.S. Capitol. Wirz was eventually buried in the Mount Olivet Cemetery in Washington, D.C. He was survived by his wife and one daughter.

The atrocities at Andersonville ranged from abuse and torture to criminal neglect and murder — but when the South began to lose the war and its resources dried up, the facility was plunged into an even worse nightmare. Food was so scarce that the Confederate prison guards died of starvation alongside thousands of the Union prisoners.

At Camp Douglas, a Union prison in Chicago for captured Southern soldiers, “one third of all of the camp’s POWs died there, sometimes due to deliberate torture and often from malnutrition and disease.” After the war, Col. B.J. Sweet, the camp’s commander, was promoted to general. (If this had happened in the current day, Pres. Bush would have given him a medal.)

While I’m not suggesting that there is a one-to-one equivalency between what happened in Civil War prison camps and Pres. Bush’s program of torturing terror suspects, I am cautioning U.S. interrogators to remember that even after Pres. Bush signs the torture bill into law in the next week or so, it will face court challenges. Retroactive immunity can’t be 100 percent guaranteed.

They should also bear in mind that public sentiment can change swiftly. In just 27 months (if not somehow mercifully sooner) George W. Bush will be back to working on his abs full time in Crawford. When he and his team of hard-nosed incompetents have left the stage, the heat of the present moment — the “get them at any cost” mentality — will also fade.

Good has triumphed over evil more often than not in American history, so far. Let’s hope sensibility will win out over the use of torture this time too.