This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The right wing's defense of the use of torture as an intelligence gathering tool

ignores its costs, both in terms of

counterproductive and false information, significant cost to American

credibility at home and abroad. David Ritker's legal policy analyst at the Cato Institute comments.

Well, we've seen lately a lot of what I consider enhanced justification techniques,

where we're looking back at history and pointing out little snippets,

where things that might be considered a win for the camp in favor of using enhanced interrogation techniques.

That by waterboarding College Sheikh Muhammad,

one of the architects of 9-11,

we have several people who were captured.

There was a man who was involved

Paracha in New York who was involved in getting visas for

people associated with al-Qaeda to come the United States. And that may prove to be a factual win for the justification of enhanced interrogation techniques.

However, there's a trucker, I'm in Ferris in Ohio who was also detained based largely on some

information from College Sheikh Mohammed. And it's not clear that he would really pose a threat

to the United States very much at all.

He wasn't much of a terrorist. His plot was to cut the cables of the Brooklyn Bridge

with a blowtorch, an enterprise which journalist Peter Bergen describes as an enterprise akin

to demolishing the Empire State Building with a firecracker.

So I'm not certain that it justified going after him with waterboarding.

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