Some quick links....

Anthropologist and activist extraordinaire Laurie King sent me the following links, which include relatively recent news items about torture, interrogation, detainees, intelligence... I'm only posting the ones I've had time to browse through.

• The New York Times posted this about Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell's testimony, which reads as something of an attempt to justify waterboarding - instrumentally if not ethically, the argument being that three of the people waterboarded seem to have provided information about Al Qaeda's activities.
  
• Here's a legal-type article on the illegality of waterboarding and another on detainee treatment and renditions.
• The legal-eagle blog Balkinization provides thoughtful critique on the Bush Administration's machinations around detainee treatment, renditions, and torture.

More conservative venues are in on the action, too.

• The Wall Street Journal's editorial page is, not surprisingly, making nimble excuses for the CIA's behavior.
• And Malcolm Nance in Small Wars Journal bravely made the argument that "Waterboarding is Torture... Period." This generated a LOT of interesting discussion among the SWJ contributors.
  

Finally, a piece by Andrew Sullivan in the UK's Sunday Times pointing out that, when it comes to detainee treatment, the Nazis pioneered a lot of the creative thinking that the Bush Administration seems to be employing.