Did torture help us catch Osama?

OK, enough cheerleading for the day, on to some substance.

Some Republicans/conservatives are already saying that this whole thing validates Guantanamo Bay and the use of "enhanced interrogation techniques," a.k.a. actions that are torture under the laws of the international community, the U.S. government, the U.S. Code of Military Conduct, and history. This is dumb, for about threereasons. [I picked that number randomly - let's see if I can think up that many.]

1. This is the most important: just because torture worked in getting information here doesn't mean that non-torturous methods, the ones that the military or law enforcement traditionally have used, would not have been equally or more effective.  In other words, even if torture yielded good information on this one occasion, there is no evidence that it yielded the information faster than other techniques.  Every study of whether torture is effective shows that it yields mostly just lots of BAD information - if someone says "tell me what you know!" before ripping out your fingernail, I'm pretty sure you'll say something, whether it's true or false. That's the technical problem with torture.

2. Morality matters. We shouldn't go around pretending to drown people. We're America. And even if we can make an exception for that dumb hypothetical of "there's a nuke in a major American city that is about to explode omg we must immediately torture this random computer analyst to get information," that wasn't the case here. Either we are a country who tortures or we are not.

3.  The ones using this as a political wedge, saying that Obama should now learn that torture and Gitmo are good - remember that it was GWB who ended "enhanced interrogation" and called for closing Gitmo.  This wasn't Obama's choice alone, he had the endorsement of his predecessor.

4. Just because we got the information from a Gitmo detainee does not mean that Gitmo is now validated. No one is saying that we should not detain and interrogate true prisoners of war. The argument is that we don't detain them forever with no trial or due process. We can still detain and interrogate these bastards as long as we don't discard our rules of law in the process. Because, you know, that's actually exactly what they want us to do.

I win. Four reasons. I dare you to have good arguments against any of them. This is a really dumb debate and it always has been.  AMERICA SHOULD NOT TORTURE PEOPLE. C'mon.