Since those documents haven’t been released, though, you’ll forgive me if I reserve judgment on their veracity, their accuracy and even their existence. Dick Cheney does not exactly have a stellar record of either honesty or…you know…being right about things which we can prove.

Instead, what we have is the testimony of one of the men who was actually in the room with Abu Zubaydah during some of his “enhanced interrogation” (torture) and – critically – before it. And he informs us that Zubaydah gave up the identity of Kalid Sheikh Mohammed within the first hour of his interrogation using traditional methods, NOT torture:

During his capture Abu Zubaydah had been injured. After seeing the extent of his injuries, the CIA medical team supporting us decided they were not equipped to treat him and we had to take him to a hospital or he would die. At the hospital, we continued our questioning as much as possible, while taking into account his medical condition and the need to know all information he might have on existing threats.

We were once again very successful and elicited information regarding the role of KSM as the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, and lots of other information that remains classified. (It is important to remember that before this we had no idea of KSM’s role in 9/11 or his importance in the al Qaeda leadership structure.) All this happened before the CTC team arrived.

Is it possible that Mr. Soufan is lying? Sure, I suppose so. But we KNOW Mr. Cheney has done so, on this very issue, more than once. I’m in favor of getting all the memos/documents/details out there into public view, but until such time as we (or some kind of independent prosecutor or truth commission) looks at them, I’m going to reserve my belief in something when it comes backed with nothing more than Dick Cheney’s say-so.

Almost a month ago, Sean Hannity – in a story which has now made its way around the interwebs – blurted out to Charles Grodin live on camera that he would be happy to be waterboarded for a soldiers’ families charity, to show that it was no big deal. He’s never followed through with it, despite nightly needling from Keith Olbermann, who was on Hannity’s offer like white on rice. It’s funny – the people who’ve been through it almost to a man will claim that it’s most certainly torture – as Jesse Ventura, of all people, recently did on The View (Ventura was a Navy SEAL and thus went through the SERE school’s training, including waterboarding). John McCain – who knows a thing or two about torture – said just yesterday that Cheney is not only not helping, but that he’s completely wrong about waterboarding. What is the masterful breadth of personal experience from which the august Mr. Thomas Sowell proffers his ivory-tower proclamation that not only is waterboarding not torture, but that to even entertain the question is “one of the many signs of the degeneration of our times?”

Mr. Sowell raises the shibboleth of the “ticking time bomb” scenario, which – not coincidentally – is the same scenario which pollsters like Scott Rasmussen use to survey the public’s “approval” of the use of torture. Rasmussen and other pollsters also usually toss in the caveat about “let’s say that we knew for CERTAIN that this specific terrorist knew the location and defuse-codes for that bomb.” But Sowell intentionally neglects to point out that such a “ticking time bomb” situation isn’t what, in fact, took place in any of the instances where US contractors were employed to waterboard terrorists. There’s no way to know for sure, of course, but I suspect that if the public were asked: do you support the use of private contractors waterboarding detainees for the purposes of extracting politically advantageous confessions of a link between two groups (Al Qaeda and Iraq) – which is what actually occurred in at least one case – the results would be far different. The “ticking time bomb” is a nice abstraction to bandy about like a badminton shuttlecock, but as Dan Froomkin ably notes:

If we knew with God-like certainty that someone we had in custody had information that could prevent an imminent attack on a large number of people — and we knew that in this particular case torture was absolutely the only way to pry it out of him — then, yes, I suspect many of us would use torture.

Indeed, ever since World War II, those laws have been codified to represent what civilized nations agree are — or at least should be — universal values. Chief among those is a respect for human dignity. The United States in particular has cast itself as the world’s champion of human dignity. And nothing is more antithetical to human dignity than torture.

Indeed.