Yea, Torture Works...

From The Intercept:

Buried in footnote 857 of the report is this remarkable account of how the CIA rendered a detainee to an unknown country, had him tortured, and then used the false information he provided about Saddam’s WMDs and “alliance” with al Qaeda to justify the U.S. attack, including information used by Colin Powell at his notorious 2003 U.N. speech

The tortured, a Libyan national named Ibn Shaykh al-Libi recanted the claim, saying that he only told the torturers what he thought they wanted to hear.

Yea, it worked wonders.  How many American servicemen and women dead?  How much money wasted or otherwise misspent?  How much pain and suffering followed from the illegal, immoral and unconscionable torture?

As Andrew Sullivan wrote:

There should, in my mind, be no debate about prosecutions for war crimes. Seriously, can you imagine the US opposing such prosecutions if they were in a foreign country? Besides, the US’ clear international and domestic legal obligations admit of no exception for the prosecution of those credibly accused of torture – let alone of those, like Cheney, who have openly bragged about it. It specifically bars any exception in the case of national emergency. Not to prosecute because of such an emergency is therefore to end the Geneva Conventions – which is what Obama has effectively done. He must not be let off the hook for that fateful step – and what it does to the core meaning of the United States.

From now on, the US is a human rights violator of the first order under international law, a rogue state that has explicitly tortured innocent people and never held anyone legally responsible. I know that sounds terribly harsh. But how is it untrue?

Indeed.

Prosecute the torture.