My God, we've got so much evidence by now that the US has been torturing people that the mind reels. Gawain's right about one thing though: that the US military was teaching and using torture for many years before Gitmo. They were even teaching torture techniques to South American military officers at the "School of the Americas" during the 1980s and early 1990s. The DoD admitted it in 1996 LINK.

Gawain, you seem to indicate that testimony of torture from prisoners and their lawyers can't be considered evidence because they have some sort of self-interest... but how can you take official denials any more seriously? Certainly, the military and the government have as much self-interest in denying abuse as any prisoner would have in laying the charges. Besides, we're constantly catching the military in that kind of lie. They do it as a matter of course. Just think of the white phosphorus denials that the government had to retract a few days ago.

Anyway, here's a link to an interview with a US Army interrogator in Iraq who talks about some of the abuses that he witnessed and participated in during his time in Iraq. He mentions inducing hypothermia, using dogs, etc... and how frequently they were pulling innocent people off the street to make it look like they were capturing lots of terrorists. He points out what every professional interrogator knows: that you don't get good intel through torture... you get it by establishing a connection with the captive and making nice.

Just this morning there was an FBI counter-terrorism interrogator on the Today Show talking about this issue saying that you don't want to torture people because they'll give you false information to make you stop. You want to turn them by getting to know them... befriending them... so that you can go back and use them as a continuing source of information.

For US citizens no. For enemy combatants yes.

How about Jose Padilla and Yaser Hamdi? They were American citizens, yet into the gulag they went. They released Hamdi last year so that they wouldn't have to test the issue in court, and Padilla is still languishing in some secret prison somewhere. Essentially, they want to be able to call US citizens "enemy combatants" and hold them forever, too.

However I put the saftey of the US above the so called rights of terrorists and unlawful combatants.

You're making the argument that all tyrannies make: that national security trumps the rule of law. That's extremely un-American.

Without the rule of law, you have to trust the executive whenever they accuse somebody. That's a rejection of the entire intellectual framework behind our system. We don't just trust King Bush, or whomever, to make the call as to who should be locked up without trial or representation for the rest of their lives. Our system assumes that power is corrupting and needs to be checked and balanced.

If the Bushies can't make a reasonable case to hold somebody through our legal system I see no reason to assume that the person should be held. We know that a huge number of detainees are locked up on flimsy evidence, or no evidence. That story the other day about the two Afghan poets who were sold to the Americans and interrogated for years because they wrote an anti-Clinton satire indicates that somebody needs to be overseeing these cases.