If David Remes can’t “disseminate” this information–if he can’t go to reporters and say, “all that damning information against my client comes not just from a detainee who was waterboarded, but it comes from the period when he was being waterboarded,” what good does it do?

So in January, Obama basically said, “This is unconstitutional so don’t make it any worse or I’ll get cross,” and this amendment, which effectively sustains the status quo but doesn’t make it worse, gets pretty much the same response from the Administration.

I had been predicting for weeks before Obama went to Poland that the Poles would move to quash their investigation into the black site at which KSM and others were tortured.

And sure enough, that appears to be what happened.

How many times have we faced this stage already? How many times over could we have prosecuted KSM already if we had just used existing, rather than Kangaroo, courts? How many more years will it take to determine whether KSM can plead guilty so as to martyr himself?

I suppose I’ll take what I can get here from McCain, especially as it’s not like there’s anyone in Washington who’s moving on prosecutions. What’s more, this really debilitates the revival of torture from the Bush Administration rejects. McCain is the ranking Republican on the Armed Services Committee. He’s going to lead the questioning of Leon Panetta when he has a confirmation hearing for Defense Secretary. The lack of consensus from Republicans at the highest levels will make it very hard for them to make an issue out of it in the hearings.

John McCain has, on balance, a good op-ed in the Washigton Post refuting Michael Mukasey’s embrace of torture. McCain’s larger point is that our approach to the Arab Spring will have a key role in our ability to defeat terrorists, which is a point not being made vociferously enough.

In the midst of the ongoing orgy of adulation for Seal Team Six killing Osama Bin Laden and the former Vice President appearing on television to advocate a return to waterboarding as official US torture policy, there has been little attention to the fact that Pakistan took several wives and children of Bin Laden into custody after the US raid of the compound. The US now seeks access to these family members. Did the US intend to torture these children with insects as they did Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s children, if the helicopter on which they would have flown had not been destroyed?

Much of the aftermath of the killing of Osama Bin Laden Sunday night in Pakistan has consisted of sophomoric chest-thumping proclaiming a twisted version of “justice” that Peterr very eloquently exposed here. There is another trend in the response, however, that is even more disgusting. A number of people involved in the torture program created and implemented during the George W. Bush administration are now trying to claim that Bin Laden would not have been found and killed without torture. Marcy Wheeler was out in front of those claims, debunking them before they came out and has stayed on the task with more details as the torturers continue their spin. The torturers are getting more desperate, and today we have none other than Jose Rodriguez, who ordered much of the torture as head of the CounterTerrorism Center (and then was the one who destroyed videotaped evidence of torture, only to be given a “get out of jail free” card by Barack Obama and Eric Holder), appearing in the press to justify his actions.

Torture didn’t lead us to OBL; rather, it led us to stop searching in concerted manner for OBL. Or so it seems when you really look at what Jose Rodriguez said.

They waterboarded KSM 183 times in a month, and he either never got asked about couriers guarding OBL, or he avoided answering the question honestly. Had KSM revealed that detail, Bush might have gotten OBL 8 years ago.

And just as importantly, the whole time KSM was shielding Abu Ahmed’s true identity while being waterboarded, KSM was also lying to the CIA about where OBL was.