Torture and Liberty

Go read Peter Levine's piece, "Torture: Against Honor and Liberty." One paragraph is particularly striking to me because it is lamentably underemphasized in the current discourse.

Torture threatens liberty because it gives the state the power to generate testimony and evidence contrary to fact, contrary even to the will of the witness. It thus removes the last constraint against tyranny, which is truth. Torture was forbidden in English common law since the middle ages, not because medievals were sqeamish about cruelty--their punishments and executions were spectacularly cruel--but because a king who could use torture in investigations and interrogations could reach any conclusions he wanted.