So, the Attorney General thinks that critics of torture are "hostile and unforgiving."

Good. They should be.

Personally, I'm not interested in the good faith defense. Torture is against U.S. law, against international law, contrary to multiple treaties that bind the U.S., morally repugnant and, to boot, an extremely unreliable method of interrogation. For decades the U.S. has condemned the use of torture by any other state; heck, the U.S. has prosecuted people as war criminals for torturing prisoners. And yet, we are supposed to believe that, desperate to prevent another 9/11, the national security apparatus turned to torture as a way to protect us because it was something they thought might work.

I almost don't know whether to be flabbergasted by the idiocy of it all or just disgusted.

It's hard to imagine the thought processes that led to this conclusion. Were they convinced that torture works by watching 24 and James Bond movies? Did they imagine that other countries, once they found out, would say "well, they really were threatened" and give us a pass (as if every other torturer doesn't say the same thing)? Did they have some idea that it never would come out, so it was okay? Did they think that all the lawyers were wimps? Or did they just want to do something - anything - but didn't have any good ideas?

Honestly, I think it may have been that they didn't have any clue what to do. I find in my profession that a lot of people who do sloppy work try to get away with acting on their first impulses, brushing away valid objections because they don't want to deal with the hard effort involved in coming up with a better answer. After 7-1/2 years of the Bush Administration, I'm beginning to think that's how they operate.

It's not just this issue, of course: you can point to Katrina, the hideous follow-up both the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions and even the U.S. Attorney scandal, which happened in part because Alberto Gonzales couldn't be bothered to get his story straight. But this has to take the prize. The Administration shredded a hundred years of moral authority and ignored well-known legal requirements just because it couldn't be bothered to develop a real intelligence program that would have protected us far better than torturing a bunch of criminals and other people they didn't like.

Come to think of it, I'm both disgusted and flabbergasted. There's no reason to settle for just one.