THOMAS SOWELL: Tortured reasoning.

If you knew that there was a hidden nuclear time bomb planted somewhere in New York City -- set to go off today -- and you had a captured terrorist who knew where and when, would you not do anything whatever to make him tell you where and when? Would you pause to look up the definition of "torture"? Would you even care what the definition of "torture" was, when the alternative was seeing millions of innocent people murdered?

Only an idiot -- or a liberal -- would worry about torture in the immediacy of a crisis.