Even If Torture Led to Bin Laden, It Was Wrong:
The right-wing is indulging in an orgy of self-congratulations over the supposed success in using torture...no, sorry, "enhanced interrogation techniques"...no, wait, torture in the killing of Osama bin Laden. "Coerced interrogation led, in part, to the death of bin Laden," said Fox "news" host Bill O'Reilly while getting a rim job from an eager Karl Rove while the Wall Street Journal editorial board was in a circle jerk, declaring the action "a vindication of Mr. Bush's interrogation policies" while spewing sperm all over the tits of a grateful Ann Coulter as she cuntishly screeched about "the same interrogations endlessly denounced by the entire Democratic Party (save Joe Lieberman), the mainstream media, and an especially indignant Jane Mayer in The New Yorker," and Sean Hannity was fellating Donald Rumsfeld so hard that the former Secretary of Defense was afraid he'd break a hip as Hannity said, through laps and gulps, "George Bush was in fact right." In the dark corner, a lonely Rush Limbaugh smoked a cigar and masturbated slowly as he gazed on the scene. On a big screen, Abu Ghraib images were accompanied by a soundtrack of screams. It's the typical mood-setter for conservatives.

Torture, motherfuckers, is what got us off, right? No, not really. Let's just demolish this shit now, shall we? In three easy steps?

1. Even if a piece of information was given up eight years ago that was some small piece in the final puzzle, we also know that waterboarded prisoners and others gave tons of false information, things that threw American intelligence off the trail for years and had them chasing phantoms. So how much time was wasted? How long was justice delayed? You might have had a case had a waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed said immediately, "Oh, shit, Osama's living large in his pimped-out Pakistan compound and here's the address." He didn't. It went the way torture usually goes: with bullshit heaped upon rat turds and poor bastards needing to sift through the pile for the possible splinter of a diamond.

2. It's a fantasy to say that torture and only torture led to the bin Laden raid, the grain of sand that became the pearl of bullet in bin Laden's face. If we're gonna pretend, let's say that the United States treated prisoners humanely. Let's say that word spread throughout the Arab world that America wasn't beating the shit out of people and sending them to Egypt to have their nuts fried. One must wonder how much sooner we might have gotten something more solid than a nickname of a courier.

3. Finally, in the end, here's why your torture program is merely the madness of thugs and warlords: innocent people were tortured, through rendition, if not outright by the CIA. Osama bin Laden wasn't a ticking time bomb. He was a prisoner in a house who couldn't even step out into sunshine for fear of detection. No scenario exists here that would justify the calculated mistreatment of people who were mistaken for terrorists.

What exists is the pathetic willingness of so, so many in this nation to cast aside our morality and laws for the expedience (no matter how long it took) of vengeance. Frankly, if the only way to get to bin Laden was waterboarding, the Rude Pundit would have rather bin Laden had stayed free. Because the Rude Pundit is more goddamned patriotic than any of these fuckers who put their animal instincts over the truly ethical principles that are supposed to guide us.

And you know who would back him up? Benjamin Franklin, man. In a mucho-quoted sentence, Franklin said, "That it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer, is a Maxim that has been long and generally approved; never, that I know of, controverted." Except, of course, the false patriots of the right.