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It's been shown again and again that torture tends to produce unreliable intelligence. If you're talking about a specific piece of vital, checkable information and a subject who's clearly a bad guy -- say, a serial killer who's left a little girl locked up somewhere -- then it's hard to argue against using whatever means are necessary to get it out of him, but what we have here is the widespread, indiscriminate application of torture to people, many of whom were clearly not terrorists. Notice how many individuals quoted in this one article were later released without any charges ever entered against them. (If you read the stories of people who have been released from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, as well as those who were victims of CIA "retentions," you find that many if not most were clearly not terrorists, just people who happened to be Muslims and who showed up at the wrong place at the wrong time. Many people in Iraq and Afghanistan were apparently turned in by neighbors who had some kind of beef with them.)

What appears to have been created is a culture of sadism, which did not distinguish between real terrorists and people arrested in random sweeps, nor between the quest for intelligence and arbitrary cruelty. It was a culture which compromised the basic human dignity of both victims and perpetrators.

These practices have deepened hate for the United States and provided another recruiting tool for the terrorists, as well as putting our own soldiers at greater risk of being subjected to similar abuse if they're captured. And how can we now condemn other countries for failing to abide by international treaties like the Geneva Convention?

What are we fighting for, if not the premise that everyone has certain inalienable rights, one of which is the right not to be subjected to cruel and inhuman punishment? In wartime there will always be isolated cases where these rights get short shrift, but if we deny basic rights as a matter of course we risk losing our moral compass and sinking to the level of our adversaries.

If it's all right to torture insurgents in Iraq, why not dissidents in Seattle or professors in New York... or anti-abortion protestors in Tulsa? Is there ANY limit on what the government should be allowed to do -- ANY rights it shouldn't be able to rescind, if necessary?

I'm curious -- what is it exactly about being outraged at the brutal torture of my fellow human beings -- people who have been charged with no crime -- by my own government that makes me a girlie-man? What IS the appropriate response to reading -- for the tenth or twentieth time -- about some ordinary guy being arrested, held for months and viciously brutalized? That he must be lying about either being innocent or being tortured, because the U.S. doesn't make mistakes? That he should quit complaining, because accidents happen, and besides he's an Arab so he probably deserves whatever he got? That America has no choice but to sodomize a few people if we're going to vanquish terrorism?

Morality aside, how can we hope to win a war when we seem to be creating enemies faster than we can kill them?