Good article Joshua, I found it particularly interesting.

so what you're saying is that saddam attacked on 9-11 because he had wmd's,
and that y'all chose san francisco for y'all's convention.

Nice to meet you Joshua. Let me give you my first dissention.

Yoo attributes that the interogation techniques protected America from domestic attacks. Fair enough. All republicans like yourself, Mr. Yoo, and Mr. Cheney needs to do is provide some concrete examples of terrorist plots that were in the process that were thwarted or interrupted through these interogation techniques. If torture was so effective an information gathering method as Yoo and others claim it should be a simple matter to present evidence supporting that claim.

What I am equally curious about is what did republican and CIA interogators think that Sheik Mohammed was going to offer on the 173th waterboarding that he hadn't offered on the last 172 previous interogations? I'm equally curious if they got it or not as they didn't proceed to waterboarding 174. Or perhaps it took 173 waterboardings for our "Intelligence" officials to realize that after being in prison for two years he'd either told interogators everything that he knew or anything he did know was so out of date as to be worthless? Again, if the CIA is so adamant on how handy torture is for information gathering they need only disclose some examples for public perusal.

But perhaps you might want to give those dozen or so protestors a second thought. You see, they, like myself, object to torture on two levels. The first is simple human empathy, one that we would expect a civil freedom loving country to employ by default. The second, is that in employing such techniques, we became a bit more like the terrorists who attacked us. Oh sure, republicans will pound their chests about protecting their land from foreign madmen... no different than muslim extremists pounding their chests about protecting their land from foreign madmen. There are other methods to gaining intelligence that do not rely on torture and humiliation. After all, we employed them for more than sixty years against both the nazis and the soviets.

And here is the crux of the matter. This subject, like so many others, is yet another where republicans can not admit that they screwed up. Every country in the civilized world, and many in the uncivilized world, recognize torture as an unacceptable evil. They do not defend themselves by unacceptable means that they do not then attempt to justify through hypothetical arguments. Yet republicans are incapable of accepting that this policy was not only ineffective (unless there is a trove of plots as yet undisclosed to Americans) but also morally wrong. Republicans who continue to try and justify the necessity of torture are those who refuse to acknowledge that they lead America down a darker and more morally suspect path.

Virtuous nations do not torture, Joshua.

Somber,
Your empathy for people is admirable, but your facts are not all there.

Clinton employed what is known as extraordinary rendition, aka "Torture by proxy". This technique is essentially the kidnapping of suspected terrorists, taking of these terrorists to another country where they are tortured, sometimes severely, and sometimes killed, or left in prison for life. The terrorists are frequently sent to the country of their origin, where they are viewed as dangerous by that countries government as much as ours. Egypt recieved many of these prisoners, and Egypt was considered to be a fatal "black site".
Clinton had plenty of Albanian Muslim exremists rendered. It isn't as black and white as you, and many others are trying to portray it.

Here is an excerpt from a report by the ACLU.
Beginning in the early 1990s and continuing to this day, the Central Intelligence Agency, together with other U.S. government agencies, has utilized an intelligence-gathering program involving the transfer of foreign nationals suspected of involvement in terrorism to detention and interrogation in countries where -- in the CIA's view -- federal and international legal safeguards do not apply. Suspects are detained and interrogated either by U.S. personnel at U.S.-run detention facilities outside U.S. sovereign territory or, alternatively, are handed over to the custody of foreign agents for interrogation. In both instances, interrogation methods are employed that do not comport with federal and internationally recognized standards. This program is commonly known as "extraordinary rendition."

Foreign nationals suspected of terrorism have been transported to detention and interrogation facilities in Jordan, Iraq, Egypt, Diego Garcia, Afghanistan, Guantánamo, and elsewhere. In the words of former CIA agent Robert Baer: "If you want a serious interrogation, you send a prisoner to Jordan. If you want them to be tortured, you send them to Syria. If you want someone to disappear -- never to see them again -- you send them to Egypt."

Somber,
Here's something from the WSJ:June 15, 2004
Extraordinary Rendition: Not Just for Republicans!
Until tonight, I knew vaguely that the policy of "extraordinary rendition"--sending terrorism suspects to countries that practice torture for interrogation--started under the Clinton administration. But I did not know any of the details.
Tonight I came across this 2001 Wall Street Journal story*, and learned the details:
CIA-Backed Team Used Brutal Means To Break Up Terrorist Cell in Albania
By ANDREW HIGGINS and CHRISTOPHER COOPER
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
TIRANA, Albania -- Ahmed Osman Saleh stepped off a minibus here in the Albanian capital in July 1998 and caught what would be his last glimpse of daylight for three days. As he paid the driver, Albanian security agents slipped a white cloth bag over Mr. Saleh's head, bound his limbs with plastic shackles and tossed him into the rear of a hatchback vehicle.
Supervising the operation from a nearby car were agents from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.
Mr. Saleh's Albanian captors sped over rutted roads to an abandoned air base 35 miles north of Tirana. There, recalled an Albanian security agent who participated, guards dumped the bearded self-confessed terrorist on the floor of a windowless bathroom.
After two days of interrogation by CIA agents and sporadic beatings by Albanian guards, Mr. Saleh was put aboard a CIA-chartered plane and flown to Cairo, according to the Albanian agent and a confession Egyptian police elicited from Mr. Saleh in September 1998. "I remained blindfolded until I got off the plane," Mr. Saleh said in the confession, a document written in Arabic longhand that he signed at the bottom.
There were more beatings and torture at the hands of Egyptian authorities. And 18 months after he was grabbed outside the Garden of Games, a Tirana childrens' park, Mr. Saleh was hanged in an Egyptian prison yard.
By the Script
His capture was one of five scripted and overseen by American agents as part of a covert 1998 operation to deport members of the Egyptian Jihad organization to Cairo from the Balkans. At the time, Egyptian Jihad was merging with Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network. U.S. authorities considered the Tirana cell among the most dangerous terror outfits in Europe. The CIA has refused to acknowledge the 1998 operation. But privately, U.S. officials have described it as one of the most successful counterterrorism
efforts in the annals of the intelligence agency....
About a dozen U.S. agents arrived in Albania to plan the arrests, according to their Albanian counterparts. CIA and SHIK operatives spent three months devising the operation, often meeting in a conference room next to Mr. Klosi's office.
On June 25, 1998, the Egyptian government issued a prearranged arrest warrant for Mr. Attiya, the forger, and demanded his deportation. Most such requests to Western countries had been ignored in the past, said Hisham Saraya, Egypt's attorney general at the time. This one was not.
That day, while driving in his 1986 Audi in Tirana, Mr. Attiya found himself being trailed by an Albanian police car and another vehicle, he later recalled in his confession. He was stopped and arrested. The same day, Albanian security officers raided his home and found more than 50 plates and stamps used to produce fake visas and other bogus documents, according to court records from his 1999 trial.
Several days later, he was taken, handcuffed and blindfolded, to the abandoned air base, north of Tirana. "There, a private plane was waiting for me," he said in his confession. Once in Cairo, he was blindfolded again and driven to Egypt's state security offices on July 2, 1998. "Since then, the interrogations have not stopped," he said.
Mr. Attiya later told his lawyer, Hafez Abu-Saada, that while being questioned, he was subjected to electrical shocks to his genitals, suspended by his limbs, dragged on his face, and made to stand for hours in a cell, with filthy water up to his knees. Mr. Abu-Saada, who represented all five members of the Tirana cell, subsequently recorded their complaints in a published report.
Also deported from Tirana was Mr. Naggar. He was nabbed in July 1998 by SHIK on a road outside of town. He, too, was blindfolded and spirited home on a CIA plane. In complaints in his confession and to his defense lawyer, Mr. Abu-Saada, Mr. Naggar said his Egyptian interrogators regularly applied electrical shocks to his nipples and penis.
Mr. Naggar's brother, Mohamed, said in an interview that he and his relatives also were -- and continue to be -- harassed and tortured by Egyptian police. He said he had suffered broken ribs and fractured cheekbones. "They changed my features," Mohamed Naggar said, touching his face.
About two weeks after Messrs. Attiya and Naggar were deported to Egypt, Albanian security agents took Mr. Tita, the dues-collector, from his Tirana apartment. They covered his head and put him on a plane. "After I was arrested, [Egyptian interrogators] hung me from my wrists and applied electricity to parts of my feet and back," he said in his confession.
As the CIA operation drew to a close, an Arab newspaper in London published a letter on August 5, 1998, signed by the International Islamic Front for Jihad. The letter vowed revenge for the counterterrorism drive in Albania, promising to retaliate against Americans in a "language they will understand."
Two days later, U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were blown up, killing 224 people. U.S. investigators have attributed the embassy bombings to al Qaeda and now believe the attacks were planned far in advance. At the time, American officials were rattled enough about the possible connection to the
Tirana arrests that they closed the U.S. Embassy there, moving the staff to a more-secure compound across town.
The embassy bombings didn't stop the CIA from going after Mr. Saleh in Tirana. In August, Albanian security agents grabbed him outside the children's park. During two months of detention in Egypt, he was suspended from the ceiling of his cell and given electrical shocks, he told his lawyer, Mr. Abu-Saada. Also rounded up was Essam Abdel-Tawwab, an Egyptian Jihad member who had lived for a time in Tirana before moving to Sofia, Bulgaria. He, too, later told Mr. Abu-Saada he was tortured. Egyptian prosecutors acknowledged in court documents that they observed a "recovered wound" on Mr. Tawwab's body.
Bill Clinton is not President anymore, and I wasn't a huge fan of his when he was. I already knew that part of the groundwork for the "extraordinary rendition" policy was laid during his presidency. I've said a hundred times that this is not and should not be a partisan issue. But apparently I am more naive and more partisan than I'd like to think, because when I read this article I was shocked that this could happen under a Democratic president.
Fact Sheet: Extraordinary Rendition (12/6/2005)

Of course, the point is that torture in and of itself is illegal (and in my mind, immoral), and the question of whether it "works" or not is an entirely separate issue. It's like asking if killing your husband for the insurance money "works." Maybe, but does that make murder legal? People such as Dick Cheney and John Yoo are trying to divert our attention from their illegal acts but claiming that torture kept us safe. How idiotic do these people think we are?