There is so much torture news! Honestly? Just grow up and read the Times, Journal, and Post stories yourselves. But there is one small torture anecdote that sums up the whole thing nicely.

One of the current pet arguments for torture made by both the dumber and the more psychotic elements of the commentariat is that it was bad (ineffective) when Pol Pot and the Commies and the Nazis used it to elicit false confessions, but it was good (effective) when we did it, because we were just looking for actionable intelligence.

Also, of course, we were looking for "evidence" of a non-existent link between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, which is sort of the midpoint between "false confessions" and "actionable intelligence."

A former U.S. Army psychiatrist, Maj. Charles Burney, told Army investigators in 2006 that interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention facility were under "pressure" to produce evidence of ties between al Qaida and Iraq.

"While we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al Qaida and Iraq and we were not successful in establishing a link between al Qaida and Iraq," Burney told staff of the Army Inspector General. "The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish that link . . . there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results."

So there you go! Good thing we waterboarded a dude 183 times in order to find proof of something we just hoped was true to justify a pointless war we were planning on starting regardless.