Criticism makes columnists hone their arguments, and Charles Krauthammer is making incremental steps in improving his defense of torture. The problem is that he is creating a confined universe of facts. For Krauthammer, we are debating the wisdom of torturing three individuals whose treatment was carefully debated and cleared with the Justice Department. Those three individuals were all members of al-Qaeda and they all had some knowledge (and more potential knowledge) about al-Qaeda’s plans. Therefore, they all fell into one of the two categories that Krauthammer lays out. Krauthammer thinks it is permissible to torture in a true ticking-bomb scenario, or, “its less extreme variant in which a high-value terrorist refuses to divulge crucial information that could save innocent lives.”

We can take this argument on frontally by examining the effectiveness of torture or by making an absolutist moral argument. But we don’t need to do that. Without conceding his point, we can explain that this is not what we’re debating. As Human Rights First detailed in a 2006 report, nearly a hundred people (at that time, now it is more than a hundred people) have died in U.S. custody during the ‘War on Terror.’ Special Forces operations like Task Force 121 have brutalized prisoners in unconscionable ways for years at places like Camp Nama in Iraq. (By the way, NAMA stands for ‘nasty ass military area’). From Guantanamo to Bagram Air Base, to Abu Ghraib prison, cruel and degrading treatment has been systemic. It is not true that we are discussing merely the officially ‘legalized’ torture that was spelled out in the recently declassified OLC memos. Dick Cheney requested the waterboarding of Iraqi Mukhabarat official Muhammed Khudayr al-Dulaymi, who was not even a member of al-Qaeda. The Red Cross made a very detailed report of the treatment of the so-called high-value detainees that were kept in black sites for years. In no way did their treatment conform with the guidelines issued by the OLC. Moreover, the CIA (and their contractors) began using torture before the OLC memos were even created, and then lied about it. They destroyed evidence, and lied about it. And, as is becoming ever clearer, much of this torture was carried out with the intent of getting false confessions implicating Saddam Hussein in the 9/11 attacks.

Looking back, we now know that coerced confessions — and in particular the questionable assertions by al-Libi — were highlighted by administration officials promoting the case for war with Iraq, in the landmark Cincinnati speech by President Bush in October 2002 and in Colin Powell’s crucial presentation to the U.N. Security Council in February 2003, the eve of the war.

Whether Bush, Cheney and their associates were seeking real or fabricated intelligence, they knowingly employed methods that were certain to produce the latter — as American officials well knew because those same techniques, especially water torture, had been used to elicit false confessions from captured Americans as long ago as World War II and the Korean conflict.

Cheney now claims that he preserved the country from terrorism and saved thousands and perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives. We need a serious investigation, with witnesses including the former vice-president under oath, to determine what he and his associates actually did with the brutal powers they arrogated to themselves — because instead their actions cost thousands upon thousands of American and Iraqi lives, all in the service of a political lie.

Until Krauthammer engages on this battlefield of facts, he’ll just be debating himself. And that, my friends, is known in the blogosphere as ‘wanking.’