But here's the critical line:

You make him tell you what he knows so you can prevent new attacks.

That's the line that defines torture. If you can impose enough mental or physical pain or suffering to make someone tell you something you want to hear you have forced them to say something, true or false, to get the torture to stop. The fact of the matter is: this is illegal under any rational understanding of domestic and international law. In fact, domestic and international law mandates that governments do not even contemplate such measures, especially in extreme circumstances.

So National Review is urging law-breaking at the very highest levels of government. They are urging an extra-legal, extra-constitutional apparatus to seize and torture terror suspects outside of ticking time bomb scenarios as a matter of first resort. And yes, if they are advocating it against the pantie-bomber now, days after his capture, it is a first resort.

This is how far Cheney and the pro-torture camp have moved the debate, and why Obama's calm attempt to overlook it is dangerous in the message it sends. What the Cheneyites themselves once refused to do, with Reid, they are now demanding Obama do to the pantie-bomber.

The few remaining voices on the right with any qualms about routine torture of terror suspects make their case with almost pathetic resignation. Glenn Reynolds seems to believe that openly exposing and opposing torture in a democracy is tantamount to endorsing and promoting it.

And that apparently is because it is more important to be appalled by the alleged "self-righteousness" and "self-glorification" of torture opponents than it is to be shocked at the notion of stripping a defenseless human being, freezing him to near hypothermia, shutting him in a tiny upright coffin, slamming him against walls, near-drowning him hundreds of times, subjecting him to sexual and religious abuse, hanging him from his joints and limbs in such a way as to create unbearable pain, tying him to a post in the freezing cold and repeatedly beating and hosing him with frigid water (as was done under McChrystal's command). Yes, it's a much more moral position to be pissed off by the alleged self-righteousness of Sullivan than to face and tackle and end illegal barbarism perpetrated by the government. This is now the libertarian position as Reynolds understands it. It's a pathetic rationalization of his own capitulation to raw partisanship and unchecked authoritarianism.

Charles Krauthammer, the intellectual architect of the torture regime, and as morally responsible for the torture of others as any in the former administration, argues that by treating the pantie-bomber like the shoe bomber,

we lose all access to any information which would save American lives.

All access to any information? He means that traditional and legal interrogation is useless? That only torture provides information?