I fail to see the point. The point is not that a reasonable man or a reasonable country panicked. It was not a reasonable response. And so far we have absolutely no evidence except the sayso of government officials who are deeply implicated in the whole mess that anything of "high value" was discovered that couldn't have been found without torture. And it doesn't matter anyway. The point is that it was WRONG AND ILLEGAL. The United States is a signatory to a convention (the blessed Ronald Reagan signed, so how could it be anything but written in gold letters in heaven) that makes it illegal.   People do wrong and illegal things: the Americans took away basic rights of the Japanese in World War II, and it took them forty years to be ashamed of it, and rectify it.   The British are using the court system to try and figure out what went wrong with their response to the war. The Americans will probably do the same, once they get going. If they don't, their ability to fight the wars that are supposed to stop Al-Qaeda in the future will be crippled, because of the moral guilt that attaches to them, and helps Al-Qaeda recruit people.



yours,

Peter T.