LONDON -- It beggars belief that U.S. President George W. Bush took so long to endorse Sen. John McCain's resolution against the use of torture by the CIA or any other U.S. organization. The resolution has been passed by an overwhelming majority in the U.S. Senate and by Congress but was, it seems, fiercely opposed by Vice President Dick Cheney and his neocon supporters, who seem to believe that evil means can be justified if the results benefit America.
Terrorists welcome such an attitude. It shows, they assert, that they are fighting against an evil regime. This is, of course, a perversion of the facts, but the use of evil means is grist to the terrorists' arguments.
Torture is barbaric and a throwback to medieval times. Information obtained by torture is never reliable. The tortured understandably will say just what their hearers want in order to mitigate the pain they have been made to suffer. The information on which the attack on Iraq was "justified" was at best unreliable. Some of it may have been obtained by torture or have come from Iraqis who thought that they could gain power by inducing an attack on their own country.