Shocking

Michael Ignatieff is on record as saying that he believes that torture persists where the law is absent not because human depravity also persists, but because when something like that is used so frequently, it must have some utility.

To him, and his co-conspirators, I present People's Exhibit 1,235,690, via K-Drum:

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. Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety — against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, "thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each...target." And so, Suskind writes, "the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered."

Note that the fiction that Bush has had nothing to do with ordering torture is revealed to be a steaming pile of shit. Of course, Bush and those who follow his orders are the lesser evil, or so some have claimed.

The only way this could be a "lesser evil" is that in this case, the victim was mentally ill before he was tortured.