I have a fairly broad beat in Washington. I cover legislation, regulations and court rulings that affect employers. I also try to keep an eye on regional companies. Most activities in this town could be a legitimate news item for me, if I pursue my charge in the most literal terms.

So, I have to triage the news of the day in Washington. This week, the capital has been dominated by a fight between the White House and Congress on one bill that would restrict the interrogation techniques the CIA can use on terrorists and another that would authorize surveillance that could involve tapping phone conversations.

Whew! I can leave that mess to the national papers and the wire services, I thought to myself. I’ll concentrate on the Bush administration’s proposal for regulatory changes to the Family and Medical Leave Act.

But, in the words of Lee Corso, my favorite ESPN college football analyst: Not so fast, my friend. An editor sent to me earlier this week a story about a supervisor at a Provo, Utah, self-help firm who is being sued for allegedly waterboarding one of his salespeople in an attempt to motivate him and his colleagues to do a better job.

Waterboarding is a method of interrogating a prisoner in which the questioner pours water over a prisoner’s head to simulate drowning. The manager did just that to his employee, saying that he wanted his team “to work as hard on making sales as Chad had worked to breathe while he was being waterboarded,” according to a claim filed by the victim.

So, it turns out that waterboarding does impact my beat. It says to me that it’s not only legislation and regulations coming out of Washington that affect managers. So does the general debate and posture that the administration and Congress take on various issues.

The White House maintains that the CIA should not be restricted to processes authorized in the Army Field Manual when it tries to pry information out of terrorist suspects. CIA agents have hundreds of hours of training and can go beyond what the Army guide mandates for members of the military service, according to the administration.

The bill Congress passed would restrict interrogation techniques to those listed in the manual, which would eliminate waterboarding. President Bush has vowed to veto that measure.

“The United States needs the ability to interrogate effectively, within the law, captured al Qaeda terrorists,” White House press secretary Dana Perino said at a briefing on Thursday. “Limiting the CIA to the Army Field Manual effectively repeals the terrorist interrogation program that (Congress) authorized just two years ago.”

She went on to say that waterboarding currently is not an option. “All the interrogations that have taken place in this country have been done in a legal way,” she said.

But she got to that answer after having been prodded and poked on the subject by the White House press corps. In fact, President Bush temporizes on the issue.

The nuances of the debate are probably lost on supervisors in offices around the country. They see a president who is arguing that the United States needs to be tough on terrorists in order to protect Americans. Each time they observe the muscular posture of the president, they may believe that waterboarding is OK. President Bush doesn’t dismiss it out of hand, after all.

If that’s not enough, they see Jack Bauer torturing characters on “24” every week—at least when the Hollywood writers aren’t on strike. They also see the ultimate antihero, Tony Soprano, “whacking” folks who get in his way on HBO.

Tony, Jack and President Bush are the good guys in many people’s opinions. And I’m certainly not for any kind of censorship of Hollywood or unreasonable restrictions on the president in executing national security policy.

But supervisors need to stay grounded in reality. It’s not OK for them to torture just because Hollywood does it. And the CIA knows a whole lot more about it than anyone in an office setting does. They’re the professionals, after all.

But the president also needs to keep in mind that whenever he doesn’t stomp on the notion that America tortures prisoners, he may be fostering such behavior in his own constituents.

Of course, all of this may work itself out. Each of the three leading candidates to replace Bush—Sens. John McCain, Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton—opposes waterboarding.