Remember when the rest of the world admired America for its truth and justice?

Those times are long gone. The US has lost all the moral authority it once had. By becoming torturers, you have no right to complain if your soldiers or fellow citizens are tortured.

Now we just laugh at the incredible hypocrasy shown by the christians of the US.

As was so sucinctly put WWJD?

You can bet he wouldnt approve of torture! If you approve of torture you have no right to call yourself a christian in any way or form.

Remember that old legal principle, innocent until proven gulty?

As for Trex, your inane rantings are not even worthy of a reply.

He was the director of the Khalden training camp, and a colleague of Abu Zubaydah — who was responsible for vetting potential trainees, and helping Khalden’s graduates with their travel arrangments.

The public record now makes clear that Khalden was not an al Qaeda camp, that neither Al Libi or Abu Zubaydah was a member of Al Qaeda, let alone an Al Qaeda leader.

Were these two men jihadists? Yes, they ran a camp that provided military training to muslims, so they could defend their religion from outside attack. But this does not mean they shared with al Qaeda the idea that “defending Islam” meant attacking the USA.

The public record supports a key element from Abu Zubaydah’s testimony before his 2007 Combatant Status Review Tribunal. The Khalden training camp was an older camp, one that dated back to the CIA’s support of foreign jihadists who traveled to Afghanistan to fight its Soviet occupiers in the 1980s. After the Soviets were defeated, and the CIA withdrew, Khalden stayed open, those who ran it were able to find other sponsors.

Abu Zubaydah testified that, in 2000, the Taliban ordered the Khalden camp, and all other training camps except Al Qaeda’s, to be shut down. He testified that he sought out Osama bin Laden — his only meeting with him — to ask for his help to get the Taliban to make an exception for his camp, the oldest and most well-known of the 100 or so training camps that dotted Afghanistan. He testified that bin Laden not only refused to help him, but that he told him that closing the non-al-Qaeda camps was his idea.

If the Bush administration had been on the ball it would have recognized the clear evidence that not all jihadists in Afghanistan supported attacking the USA. They would have tried to exploit this split. They would have tried to enroll bin Laden’s rivals on our side, or failing that, tried to get them to stay on the sidelines.

Torturing these two men was a big mistake.

There are people who are fundamentally opposed to torture, on moral grounds, under all circumstances. Although this group doesn’t say so, they would oppose torture even if there were ways it could be made to “work”.

There are people who find torture morally repugnant, and who would oppose its use, except under very exceptional circumstances.

There are people who have no moral reservation against torture. They see it as just one more tool. But in the public debate over torture, they try to convince people who would only agree for torture to be used under exception circumstances that these are exceptional circumstances.

And the fourth group are very similar to the third, except they don’t really care if torture “works”. The real reason they justify the use of torture, to gain information, is they relish the side effect of making the suspects are suffering. For them the important thing about the use of torture is the payback, the vengeance factor.

It seems to me that those in the third group, those who advocate the use of torture, who aren’t sadists, who really just want to see vengeance extracted, would stop advocating torture if they found it didn’t make the public safer.

It seems to me that keeping the public safe is so important vengeance should be ignored.

And it seems to me that when examined objectively the public record is very clear — from the perspective of keeping the public safe the use of torture has been a disaster.

The biggest failure was the torture of Ibn Al Shaykh Ibn Al Libi. He was, at the time of his torture, believed to be one of the very most inner circle of al Qaeda’s leadership. Under torture he confessed to two things Cheney and company believed to be true. He confessed that, as the director of the Khaldan training camp he supervised trainers sent by Saddam Hussein to train al Qaeda operatives how to use Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. This confession seemed to prove that there were significant ties between Saddam and Al Qaeda. And it seemed to prove that Iraq had an arsenal of WMD.

Colin Powell’s speech to the United Nations was largely based on the confessions wrung from Al Libi.

We now know both elements of the confession wrung from him through torture were wildly incorrect. Saddam had no ties to Al Qaeda. Saddam had destroyed all his WMD in 1991.

Would the Bush Presidency have gotten enough support to invade if it had not put forward these false claims that were based on false confessions wrung through torture?

How many Americans have died in Iraq? How many would have died if the CIA had not tortured Al Libi?

Personally, I think Saddam would have been assassinated, or overthrown by an uprising aided by support by Iraq’s neighbors, if the UN had made the USA wait until Hans Blix confirmed Saddam had no WMD. Saddam knew his position was at risk. He remained safely in office so long as those who hated him feared he still possessed WMD.

Maybe he wouldn’t have been toppled. But no Americans would have died.

So, no torture didn’t make the public safer, it made it less safe. There are many other examples of how reliance on false confessions have made the public less safe.

We have limited resources we can devote to guarding against secret terror attacks. There is always one more terrorism risk to guard against. So we have to make smart choices on which risks to guard against. And that smart choice has to be based on the very most reliable intelligence. Public safety is pubt at risk every time our precious and limited counter-terrorism are allocated to guard against threats that surfaced from confessions and denunciation wrung through the use of abusive techniques. Counter-terrorism resources squandered on wild-goose-chases are not available to guard against real threats.

Anyone who advocates the use of torture solely because they think it makes the public safer should stop advocating it right now. It has not made the public safer. It has made the public less safe.