Seeing as we’ve been torturing the Earth for so long, I think it’s appropriate today to celebrate the torture of humans. Not that the Earth is torturing us, of course (though Mother Nature does have a bit of a cruel streak at times). Mostly, we do it to each other. But at least we do it for good reason.

For instance, torturing detainees yielded “high value” information, according to President Obama’s national intelligence director, Dennis Blair. Blair wasn’t particularly specific (a few minutes on the rack ought to change that), but he did say “high value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding of the al Qa’ida organization that was attacking this country….”

Well, there you go. We were able to draw up an organizational chart on a group that, by definition, has little if any structure. Probably forced the bad guys to do it themselves using Vizio (which can be a bit like torture in and of itself, until you get used to it). No wonder al Qa’ida seems to have hundreds of “number two” men. And #2 out there in the mountains of Afghanistan is no picnic (especially in the winter). But wait, there’s more!

Our brave and noble inquisitors also managed to ferret out “‘a couple of nebulous links’ between al Qaida and Iraq”.

The Bush administration put relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.
[…]
Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s people were told repeatedly, by CIA . . . and by others, that there wasn’t any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam, and that no such ties were likely because the two were fundamentally enemies, not allies.”

Senior administration officials, however, “blew that off and kept insisting that we’d overlooked something, that the interrogators weren’t pushing hard enough, that there had to be something more we could do to get that information,” he said.

That’s right. Without torturing people, the Bush administration wouldn’t even have managed to come up with a half-assed justification for invading a country that wasn’t a threat – imminent or otherwise – to the United States or the rest of the world.

Oh, they could have used some illegal wiretaps, I suppose. Back in the olden days, people like Jane Harman thought that stuff was just peachy.

[According to Harman] when the U.S. Government eavesdropped for years on American citizens with no warrants and in violation of the law, that was “both legal and necessary” as well as “essential to U.S. national security,” and it was the “despicable” whistle-blowers (such as Thomas Tamm) who disclosed that crime and the newspapers which reported it who should have been criminally investigated, but not the lawbreaking government officials.

Now that the government is spying on her, though (albeit legally, and with a warrant), Jane has seen the light.

I’m just very disappointed that my country — I’m an American citizen just like you are — could have permitted what I think is a gross abuse of power in recent years. I’m one member of Congress who may be caught up in it, and I have a bully pulpit and I can fight back. I’m thinking about others who have no bully pulpit, who may not be aware, as I was not, that someone is listening in on their conversations, and they’re innocent Americans.

Sounds like Jane’s gettin’ serious.