Lindsay Graham's stress positions

According to Dahlia Lithwick, Sen. Huckleberry's enhanced interrogation techniques were no more effective then the private contractors Rumsfeld's Pentagon hired.

The highlight of the hearing was supposed to be former FBI interrogator Ali Soufan, who was going to testify to the fact that abusive interrogation was "slow, ineffective and unreliable" and that Bush administration claims about critical information that was elicited through torture were "half truths," since most of the information they cite was gleaned by other methods. Soufan testifies from behind a panel for security reasons, and photographers are purged from the room, which is all very Get Smart, but Graham won't give the man a chance to speak. Time and again, Soufan—the only man present who has ever conducted an interrogation—begs to speak. But Graham keeps hollering at him about how dare he purport to speak for all interrogators everywhere. (Erm. He didn't.)

Ethics expert David Luban testifies that the Office of Legal Counsel memos were an "ethical train wreck" that "read as if they were reverse engineered to reach a predetermined outcome." Luban's main point is that if your 4-year-old Googled "water board," they would discover a 26-year-old appellate opinion repeatedly referring to the technique as "torture." But somehow this "single most relevant case in American law" was never even mentioned in the torture memos. Graham's masterful cross examination of Luban ranges from accusing the man of never having met Jay Bybee or John Yoo, accusing him of calling another panelist—Addicott—unethical since he also believes water-boarding is not torture, and accusing him of misleading the panel for failing to cite a case. The net effect of this performance is to establish conclusively that shouting at, browbeating, and humiliating someone is unlikely to produce any useful intelligence. Such subtlety would be lost on Sen. Graham.