Against all odds, Starbucks, Guantanamo Bay and the torture debate have joined forces today to make news.

Anonymous law enforcement and military officials revealed that F.B.I. interrogators provided Al Qaeda suspects with “food whenever they were hungry as well as Starbucks coffee at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba,” The Washington Post wrote in a front-page article.

The effort to gather evidence against Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and five others on trial for their roles in the Sept. 11 attacks was reported by The Los Angeles Times back in October, but the Starbucks detail raised a couple of questions.

First: There’s a Starbucks at Guantanamo? Like all military bases, this one has all sorts of comforts from home, as a lawyer who visited last year wrote in In These Times magazine:

There is (of course) a Starbucks, a McDonalds, a combined Subway-Pizza Hut, a Wal-Mart-like big box store called the Nex and a gift shop . . . yes, Guantanamo has a gift shop that sells Guantanamo key chains, shot glasses, t-shirts and shell tchotckes. Fillipino and Haitian workers staff all the establishments. And in the distance, beyond these icons of American consumption, is the “gulag.”

The second question was the more newsworthy one: If F.B.I. agents were able to get the detainees to talk without harsh interrogation methods, did the C.I.A. have to use them?

The debate has been laid bare in recent months, with a strong opinion for every side. The Post stayed out of it, saying that the answer was “unknowable.”

But several bloggers hailed another piece of evidence that the C.I.A. went too far. Here’s one example, from Spencer Ackerman of The Washington Independent:

So we tortured these people, forever sullying the reputation of the U.S. during a time when we’re allegedly fighting a war for Muslim hearts and minds, when we could have offered them a cup of coffee for the same—and probably better—effect.

And last Tuesday, Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, seized upon another recent boon to the F.B.I. side of the argument: publicity for the F.B.I.-handled interrogation of Saddam Hussein.

Herewith, the fine line between self-congratulation and subtle criticism:

Senator Feinstein: And clearly it worked very well. Director Robert S. Mueller III of the F.B.I.: We believe so. Senator Feinstein: Does the FBI use the same techniques that the CIA has authorized? Director Mueller: It has been our policy not to use coercive techniques.

Standing firm on the other side are senior Bush administration officials and John Kiriakou, a former C.I.A. operative who supervised one instance of waterboarding in 2002. The technique wasn’t used until all other options were exhausted, he said, and it “probably saved lives.”

As if the debate wasn’t boiling fast enough, Justice Antonin Scalia of the Supreme Court added to the debate today, emphasizing that torture may be constitutional in a ticking time bomb scenario.

“It would be absurd to say you couldn’t do that,” he added, “and once you acknowledge that, we’re into a different game.”