Torture Didn't Catch OBL

Greg Sargent has a major scoop today: the letter that Leon Pantta sent John McCain, which generally supports accounts of the hunt for bin Laden that minimize the usefulness of torture.

Recall too that on the strictly pragmatic side, any positive contribution from torture has to be balanced against well-documented direct and indirect costs of torture (for example, the former includes the false leads that torture produces; the latter includes any terrorist recruitment caused by bad publicity about torture). And that's just the pragmatic case; there's obviously a serious moral and ethical case against torture.

I'll repeat again what I said last week: outside of government, the anti-torture crowd is calling for open (as much as possible), neutral investigation into what actually happened and what the consequences were. As far as I can tell, the pro-torture gang is either silent or against such an examination.