Matthew Yglesias is an Idiot: I Have Proof!!!

Let's go wih your strawman anyway...

For every waterboarding the Bush adminsitartion had done on tens or hundreds of suspects, you have saved what, (potentially)1000 lives. OK. I will buy that argument. Waterboadring is SO EFFICIENT! "We" must have saved what hundreds of thousands of lives. Great. But if you do the same on your scores(read: millions) of gangbangers and suspects in America, you can potentially save even more American lives, and you can see the proof of those figures in open statistics not muddied by fuzzy claims of averting an imminent disaster by the likes of Cheney. IF you still have doubts on the efficacy of torture in extracting the information you need, ask China! Enjoy.

My political views maybe liberal, but the 'attitude' you rather refer to was molded  in the fires of RedState.

Since you mentioned Kos. Here's how the 'conservative mind' looks like:

Bowers:

"It must be really scary to be a conservative. To be one, you must live in constant fear of terrorists nuking the United States, of gay people on the verge of convincing you that you really enjoy sodomy, of Spanish becoming the official language of the United States next week, of every African-American voting seven or eight times in the next election, of radical Islam suddenly becoming the latest hip thing among kids across the country, of perpetual lesbian orgies in girls bathrooms in high schools across America, of liberals forcing everyone to become a vegan, of Christians being rounded up into concentration camps, and of Democrats outlawing private property if they were to ever take power again."

They do live in a state of fear, and what's more, they want everyone else to join them hiding under their bed, in their pool of urine.

Oh, they'll talk tough. They'll bluster and pound their chests like the neanderthals they are.

But inside, they are scared little children, terrified of the world, of people not like them, of change.

And they can't fathom any other way to live.

of shit. Dennis Blair , you know, Director of National Intelligence,(Obama's guy) said waterboading worked. So it must work if Obama's guy said it did, right skayne? You've never disagreed with this administration before.

I'm against the Monday morning quarterbacking. The US had just been attacked. More attacks were planned and we had people who had that info. And they gave it up.

Now for Obama to stand there and say "I could have gotten the information through conventional methods"  is offensive.

And germane to the goals of this site, I can't for the life of me understand why many in the GOP are willing to die on this hill.  Yes, they'll grumble about excessive Bush spending, but along comes an issue that strikes to the soul of who we are as a nation, as a law-abiding people, and they go all-in with the most egregious excesses of the Bush administration.  Amazing.

They probably think it's safe to take up Dick Cheney's cause because polls say a majority of Americans don't believe this should even be investigated.  The question posed was not about prosecution, mind you, but just "should we investigate?"  I'm saddened and terrified for us that we as a people are unwilling to understand and confront what was done in our name. 

But I don't see how we can avoid responsibility for an investigation under the Geneva Conventions.  If we are so cowardly as to do that, I don't doubt that others will do it for us; they have the responsibility and capacity to do so under the treaty we signed.  Spain's interest in getting to the bottom of this is understandable.  As one of the (few) members of the "Coalition of the Willing" they may now be wondering whether Spanish citizens died because they relied on false confessions extracted by the Bush administration to link Al-Qaeda to Iraq (as some of the evidence seems to indicate).

Question for the torture apologists:  now that the world knows we sanctioned methods designed to extract false confessions, and has no reason to think we won't go back to that given that we don't have the fortitude to even investigate, how much credibility do you think foreign governments will give our intelligence if we ask them to join us in military actions based on that intelligence? 

There are many more considerations in adopting a 'legal' torture program than Dick Cheney would have you believe.  I'll save more for a post, but efficacy is far from the only aspect worth considering.