The best arguments against torture have names.

Ibn al-Sheik al-Libi, who was subjected to what the Bush administration called "enhanced interrogation techniques" and provided under those techniques false information regarding Iraq giving training to al-Qaeda operatives, died recently in a Libyan prison. There were some people who hadn't even known where he was--he was what you might call "disappeared". I think his existence might've been a bit embarrassing to the Bush administration.

See, his torture, or harsh interrogation, if you prefer, led to bad information, that corroborated bad information the White House already had from Ahmed Chalabi, who as a kind of leader among Iraqi exiles, had noooooooooo (sarcastic "no", m'kay?) reason to give self-serving crap intell to the US if it meant he'd maybe be a force to be reckoned with in a regime-changed Iraq. But there was no Iraq/al-Qaeda link. And the weapons program Saddam Hussein had in, say the '90's was vestigial, at best by 2001-2002. And he, being what you'd call an authoritarian, wouldn't have trained whacko radicals in how to make biological weapons. Or use them. That would actually be really dumb for him to want to do, since radical Islamists could just as easily turn them against his, yes, authoritarian, but not Islamist, government. Hussein was a proper paranoid. That stuff didn't happen.

But torture could make somebody imply that it did. When Dick Cheney goes around right now telling people torture worked, maybe this guy is what he's talking about. A guy who was buried alive. A guy who either was so despondent he took his life, or?

You don't have to think of these people as innocent--you just have to think of them as people. al-Libi ran a training camp, but if you were to read Jane Mayer's quite good book, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals, you would've have learned that he talked early. Before the interrogation techniques we'd call torture--if by "we" we meant honest people. Zubayda talked under regular interrogation. Khalid Sheik Muhammed, too. But maybe they just didn't say the right things.

Who else didn't say the right things? Dilawar-a taxi driver who was murdered in Bagram. Khaled al-Masri, Mamdouh Habibi, and Maher Arar--just guys who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, with the wrong sort of names. But they were renditioned, and they received what I can't help but call torture. Omar Khadr--well--he wasn't interrogated as such, just had his sleep suspended for days on end as he was moved about--a 15-yr old boy when they picked him up.

They are human beings. They aren't all good--but they aren't all bad. The information isn't worth it. It never was. This "torture works" crap is a lie, and irrevalent in the face of what has been done. People have been destroyed.

We are better than this argument. That John Yoo has a column in my city's numero uno newspaper, The Inquirer, seriously makes me sick. Because airing his views is akin to sponsoring them, supporting them, lending credibility to them. There should not be a debate--this is torture, it is bad and illegal, and not any representative of our government who sponsored it should avoid prosecution--let alone being given a platform to continue pimping it. That Liz Cheney sees fit to haul herself in front of a camera and pretend she doesn't know the difference between a voluntary "hazing" and involuntary interrogation, or has to trot out the "It worked" nonsense, just makes me sad. Of course she doesn't want her young'in's to be told by classmates that their grandpappy is a war criminal.

Mayhap she hasn't realized the problem isn't with public opinion, but with what old Grandpa did.