We Are The United States

And this is what we do (via Sullivan):

Which brings us back to the unbalanced Abu Zubaydah. "I said he was important," Bush reportedly told Tenet at one of their daily meetings. "You're not going to let me lose face on this, are you?" "No sir, Mr. President," Tenet replied. Bush "was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth," Suskind writes, and he asked one briefer, "Do some of these harsh methods really work?" Interrogators did their best to find out, Suskind reports. They strapped Abu Zubaydah to a water-board, which reproduces the agony of drowning. They threatened him with certain death. They withheld medication. They bombarded him with deafening noise and harsh lights, depriving him of sleep.

In case you're unclear, we didn't torture him because we thought he had information. We tortured him because we didn't want the President to look bad.

But let us not forget what we are up against and what they do:

Maj. Gen. Abdul Azziz Mohammed Jassim, the chief of operations of the Ministry of Defense, said that he had seen an official report and that he could confirm the two Americans had been "killed in a very brutal way and tortured."

"There were traces of torture on their bodies, very clear traces," General Jassim said. "It was a brutal torture. The torture was something unnatural."

It's so sad to see that our official-unofficial policies of torture have created a situation in which our detractors can say "Oh, look, they're just as bad." How much of our nation's moral authority is our administration going to continue to sacrifice to these terrorist monsters with our illegal and unethical torture policy? How much?