Well, as usual the emotions run high, and rational realistic thought runs somewhere under the table.

I am against torture, and I am against arrest & imprisonment without due process. It should not be lost on any American that our so often praised Constitution is also very explicit & very opposed to any use of torture. That same Constitution is opposed to arrest & imprisonment without due process, and against search without warrants, and against localizing arrest-&-imprisonment in the same branch of government as guilt-vs-innocence. When we start "cherry picking" the Constitution, and tossing out what is inconvenient for the moment; then we face the "slippery slope" of complete & dangerous constitutional disregard.

First, most of the expert interrogators maintain that with torture any person will say anything: not necessarily accurate or practical information, but just anything to make the pain stop: and pre-selected "misinformation" can be difficult to discern from accurate information. (So how does the use of torture advance our knowledge to defeat terrorism?) Its pretty clear, it does not. But it does most certainly give our enemies loads of propiganda to use against us, and to recruit their own armies.

Yes what happened on 9/11 was terrible to be sure: and some how our government needs to get a better method of dealing with this ideology of hatred that has alligned against us. But, I do not think that we can win by falling to the lowest common denominator and still having poor information.

I would rather look at why the memo from the FBI field agent, that described young foreign students studying how to fly --but not to land-- airliners, got misplaced on some supervisors desk. Or how the communications & financial clues were not more closely observed & investigated.

According to present accounts, many of the terrorists had taken these same flights on several occasions before they pulled off 9/11: I know that Israel has a computer program to keep track of an individuals previous flight patters before the person boards one of their aircraft, and these patterns are studied; I wonder if we have a similar program to evaluate previous flying patterns for passengers? (If not, it could have helped pre-9/11; and I hope we do now.) To me, things like this are a whole lot more helpful then torture! ....pjwky