"They cut off my clothes with some kind of doctor’s scalpel. I was totally naked … They took the scalpel to my right chest. It was only a small cut. Maybe an inch. Then they cut my left chest. One of them took my penis in his hand and began to make cuts. He did it once, and they stood still for maybe a minute, watching my reaction. I was in agony, crying, trying desperately to suppress myself, but I was screaming … They must have done this 20 to 30 times in maybe two hours. There was blood all over. They cut all over my private parts. One of them said it would be better just to cut it off, as I would only breed terrorists. This was repeated many times over the next 15 months … "

These are the words of Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian-Briton who was just released from Guantanamo, detailing his extraordinary rendition to Morocco. Morocco was chosen for two reasons. CIA wanted a confession related to the "dirty bomb plot," and thought if anyone could extract it, the Moroccans could. MI5 on the other hand knew he lived in an African section of London, and used his interrogators to gather information on their own Moroccan citizens – whom they apparently view as a suspect class. When the British High Court threatened to release details of CIA/MI5 involvement in Mohamed’s torture, former President George W. Bush threatened to stop sharing intelligence. Obama has since thanked the British for their silence.

Now the ACLU has taken up Mohamed’s case in a lawsuit against Jeppeson Dataplan, the Boeing subsidiary that, according to CIA flights logs, flew the planes for the extraordinary rendition. While widely publicized in Britain, this story has been obscured in United States by the release of four memos that have re-ignited the American debate on torture. This debate has become restricted to three talking points: (1) Is waterboarding torture? (2) Does it yield good info we can’t get otherwise? (3) Does it make us safer? While slightly ignorant of our treaties and laws, these are apparently core questions for many people, who have moral problems with torture but also worry about getting blown up.

Thomas Friedman has bigger fish to fry. Just as he was ready to admit the Iraq War was a war of choice, he’s also ready to admit that American forces regularly torture and murder detainees and that often "this abuse involved sheer brutality that had nothing to do with clear and present dangers." Friedman’s contribution is unique because he sets out to answer not just if we tortured, but why we tortured. But just like Iraq, his reasons are actually much more ideological and sinister than the conventional ones – which means we should look at them very carefully.

But here is where Friedman forgets the most overlooked fact in the American torture debate, one which is rather obvious for those following in the rest of the world. For most of the people we capture, we don’t know who they are. Binyam Mohamed was just released from Guantanamo Bay; 520 other detainees were released before him. Even if Mohamed did train at an Al-Qaeda training camp, he never took up arms against anyone. The only crime he ever committed was having a fake passport. Torturing Al Qaeda leaders for information is one thing, but torturing innocent people suspected of being Al Qaeda is another question entirely – something most civilized people would object to, no matter their opinion on talking points (1) (2) and (3).

But why no investigations/prosecutions? Is Obama really afraid of tearing the country apart? Partly. Most likely, the Democratic party also has a great deal to be ashamed of. More importantly, an investigation into the previous Administration would bring the legality of a whole mess of current practices into question (which I’ll go into later). For this Administration’s current objectives, the costs far outweigh the benefits, which is why his decision not to prosecute is being praised so widely in Establishment circles.

Apparently, everything has worked itself out! The logic here is baffling, even for those ideologues who still support the invasion. Friedman admits that even if we win the Iraq War, we will be in more danger than before. Which should remind us, he never argued the war was an act of self-defense in the first place, just like he has never explicitly argued that torture can produce life-saving information. The closest he came was implying it was our only available "deterrent." Friedman is after something else entirely. What that is sort of hard to figure out.  Years ago he argued that invading Iraq would make them free, but wouldn’t prevent an attack. Now he says that preventing an attack keeps us free, even if it erodes certain freedoms and that the invasion has inadvertently prevented an attack, which in the end keeps us free. What he thinks this has to do with torture and prosecutions, I’m not sure.

However, those following the Levin Report that was declassified last month know that Iraq has a great deal to do with torture.  Major Paul Burney testified to the House Armed Services Committee that "a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq and were not successful in establishing a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq. The more frustrated people go in not being able to establish a link there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results."

Another African detainee, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, could corroborate this story – if we knew where he was (since his confession, he has disappeared into the CIA’s Secret Prison system and is now rumored to be in Libya ). "The Libyan" was captured in 2001 and sent to Egypt where he was beaten and subjected to a mock burial. After 17 hours in a 20-inch box, he "confessed" that Saddam had attempted to train Al Qaeda operatives in chemical and biological weapons. If this sounds familiar, that’s because it ended up in Colin Powell’s infamous speech to the United Nations in 2002. When Al-Libi was sent back to the CIA, he retracted his story and told his handlers that he "had difficulty even coming up with a story." Abu Zubayda also managed to produce false intelligence linking Bin Laden and Saddam – and the fantastical dirty bomb plot that Binyam Mohamed was later accused of. The political capital gained from these confessions was invaluable at the time. Too bad none if it was true.

Now Friedman’s article starts to make sense. Without the torture of high value detainees, there could have been no Iraq Invasion. It should come as no surprise that techniques initially conceived during "behavior modification" experiments would extract less than truthful "confessions." Like Friedman says, "In an ugly war, you do your best." And that is what Rumsfeld and Cheney’s lawyers did. Just like their Cold War predecessors, they saw that that coercion was the best way to get the confessions they wanted and they did their best to legalize it. This became America’s new "deterrence" strategy, even for small-time catches like Binyam Mohamed – whose torturers told him outright "we’re going to change your brain."

"They were training me what to say," says Mohamed. ”It was when they started asking the questions supplied by the British that my situation worsened. They sold me out … They had fed me enough through their questions for me to make up what they wanted to hear. I confessed to it all. I said Khalid Shaikh Mohammed had given me a false passport after I was stopped the first time in Karachi and that I had met Osama Bin Laden 30 times. None of it was true. The British could have stopped the torture because they knew I had tried to use the same passport at Karachi both times. That should have told them that what I was saying under torture wasn’t true. But so far as I know, they did nothing."

It was at the Dark Prison in Kabul that Mohamed endured the more classic "brainwashing" techniques from MKUltra – prolonged isolation, sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, and the inducing of fear and humiliation (techniques that are still allowed under Appendix M of the 2006 Army Field Manual).

"The toilet in the cell was a bucket. Without light, you either find the bucket or you go on your bed,’ Mohamed says. "There were loudspeakers in the cell, pumping out what felt like about 160 watts, a deafening volume, non-stop, 24 hours a day … While that was happening, a lot of the time, for hour after hour, they had me shackled. The longest was when they chained me for eight days on end, in a position that meant I couldn’t stand straight nor sit. I couldn’t sleep. I had no idea whether it was day or night. You got a shower once a week, with your arms chained above you, stripped naked, in the dark, with someone else washing you. The water was salty and afterwards you felt dirtier than when you went in. It wasn’t a shower for washing: it was for humiliation. In Kabul I lost my head. It felt like it was never going to end and that I had ceased to exist."

According to him, those five months were worse than the years spent in Guantanamo, even worse than the rendition to Morocco – another practice that is still legal under President Obama. (And don’t let Friedman fool you, the rendition program started under President Clinton).

The Los Angeles Times reports: "Under executive orders issued by Obama recently, the CIA still has authority to carry out what are known as renditions, secret abductions and transfers of prisoners to countries that cooperate with the United States. Current and former U.S. intelligence officials said that the rendition program might be poised to play an expanded role going forward because it was the main remaining mechanism — aside from Predator missile strikes — for taking suspected terrorists off the street.

"Obviously you need to preserve some tools — you still have to go after the bad guys," said an Obama administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity when discussing the legal reasoning. "The legal advisors working on this looked at rendition. It is controversial in some circles and kicked up a big storm in Europe. But if done within certain parameters, it is an acceptable practice."

The legality of kidnapping aside, there’s really only one institution we can trust to impose these parameters and that is the courts.  By all accounts, the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp was far more accommodating then the other places Mohamed was flown to ("’A hundred nights in Oscar Block is the equivalent of one night in the dark prison"). The loopholes left open by Obama’s Executive Orders would allow for a repeat of the worst abuses suffered by Binyam Mohamed. On another level there’s the question of justice. After all, the Department of Justice isn’t just blocking Mohamed’s lawsuit, they are blocking all the other Bagram detainees from appealing their cases – all the while giving impunity to Cheney and his lawyers. To restore Rule of Law, these cases must be heard. If they are not, the national conversation will stay limited to the parameters set by the Op-Ed pages, the Cable News Shows, and ultimately, the Administration itself. Some have offered African precedents as a possible alternative to prosecutions, referring to the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions in Rwanda, Liberia, and South Africa. While perhaps flawed, at least these Commissions were able to open up the public debate – an example the United States could learn from.