Since Osama bin Laden’s death, conservatives have tried to resurrect the debate on the value of tortue in a seeming attempt to defend their own defense of illegal activity. Based on news reports that small pieces of information that eventually led U.S. intelligence to locate bin Laden were obtained under the Bush administration’s terror detainee torture program, right-wing torture apologists have projected that this must mean that torture works and Bush and co. were justified in authorizing it.

But aside from whether or not torture works (it actually doesn’t), today on a Center for American Progress-sponsored press call, Matthew Alexander, former Air Force interrogator who led the team that tracked down Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, wondered, “Why are we having a discussion about efficacy?” “Torture is wrong,” he said, noting that “it’s a moral issue…and it’s a legal issue.” He then astutely compared the issue to soldiers using illegal weapons on the battlefield:

ALEXANDER: And we don’t apply that same standard to other fields like the infantry, who despite facing some obstacles in battle, are not allowed to use chemical weapons which are 100% effective. So I reject the fact that we reduce this to an argument about efficacy.

Also on the call was Glenn Calme, a former CIA official who led the interrogation of a high level terror detainee. Calme told ThinkProgress yesterday that torture is never justified, and today agreed with Alexander’s point that debating the efficacy of torture is useless:

CARLE: No one would would accept in the United States that if we knew that there was one guilty party in a room of 20 people that we would kill all 20 people because that would eliminate the problem. We simply don’t do it. It’s unacceptable. Similarly you might believe that an individual has one bit of information or some information useful among a host of other things that he knows that are not relevant, you shouldn’t torture that person any more than you would kill 20 people to extract one theoretical piece of information. That is an insane argument that we’re actually even having.

Aside from the many reasons why the United States should never use torture, the fact is that not using torture works better! As Alexander noted during the call:

ALEXANDER: We do know that other interrogation techniques would have worked and produced more info definitively. And why do I say that? Because we have Saddam Hussein who was captured without using them. And we have Abu Musab al-Zarkawi who my team tracked down and killed without using them. We have an entire generation of interrogators in World War II, Vietnam, Panama, the first Gulf War, all did their jobs without enhanced interrogation techniques. There’s no doubt in my mind that we could have gotten more without enhanced interrogation techniques.

So why break the law, face international condemnation and risk creating more terrorists when you don’t have to?

Back in March, when the Obama administration announced that the Department of Justice (DOJ) would no longer defend the definition of marriage set forth by Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), several immigration offices responded by putting applications and petitions involving married, binational same-sex couples on hold until the issue was resolved. Normally, members of the LGBT community who are married to a foreign national would not be able to sponsor their partner for a green card and prevent his or her spouse from being deported. The immigrant rights and LGBT communities were crushed when in April the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services indicated that “the hold is over, so we’re back to adjudicating cases as we always have.”

Today, in what is being described as a “very rare decision,” DOJ Secretary Eric Holder announced that he has vacated — or essentially wiped out — a decision by the Board of Immigration Appeals in reference to a recent case in which the BIA applied DOMA’s Section 3. In his decision, Holder listed the criteria the BIA should consider:

1) whether respondent’s same-sex partnership or civil union qualifies him to be considered a “spouse” under New Jersey law;
2) whether, absent the requirements of DOMA, respondent’s same-sex partnership or civil union would qualify him to be considered a “spouse” under the Immigration and Nationality Act;
3) what, if any, impact the timing of respondent’s civil union should have on his request for that discretionary relief; and
4) whether, if he had a “qualifying relative,” the respondent would be able to satisfy the exceptional and unusual hardship requirement for cancellation of removal.

Attorney Eric Berndt of the National Asylum Partnership on Sexual Minorities at the National Immigrant Justice Center told Metro Weekly that Holder’s decision “adds some heft to our requests for prosecutorial discretion in individual cases in which the foreign partner” of a same-sex bi-national couple is seeking a green card because of his or her citizen same-sex partner.

Queerty points out that Holder’s decision isn’t just significant because he is asking the BIA to stop and reconsider this specific deportation, he has chosen to vacate a decision involving a civil union rather than a marriage. “This is a huge huge huge deal for all the bi-national couples in states that do not have marriage,” notes the blog.

Coincidentally, Rep. Mike Honda (D-CA) reintroduced the Reuniting Families Act today, a bill that would eliminate discrimination in immigration law against LGBT citizens and their foreign born partners, amongst other things.

While most reasonable people are praising President Obama for his “gutsy” call to get Osama bin Laden, some on the right are still harboring partisan grudges. Conservative billionaire David Koch gave Obama zero credit for the successful mission, telling reporters, “I don’t think he contributed much at all.” Koch called the president “a hardcore socialist” and minimized his role in the operation, explaining, “All that Obama did was say ‘yea’ or ‘nay.’”

Fox News Host Glenn Beck said Obama’s New York visit was “obscene” and his only purpose was to “sop up some more glory and take a victory lap.”

And yesterday, on Frank Gaffney’s Secure Freedom Radio show, Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) took it one step further and reacted to Osama bin Laden’s death in an unusual way — by saying President Obama is too concerned with “exploit[ing] the issue for political reasons” to “do what’s necessary to protect this country:”

FRANKS: I’m afraid that this administration somehow now will declare the peace dividend and really just exploit the issue for political reasons and not really have the insight to do what’s necessary to protect this country in the future because we still have an Iran that is on the cusp of gaining nuclear weapons capability, we still have terrorists all over the world that are steeped in this ideology, we still have the potential of radical Islamists in the Pakistani military appropriating nuclear weapons and passing that along to terrorists.

Listen here:

Franks also suggested that the president is not being responsive to the threat of “Islamists” and as a result, the country is likely to suffer another 9/11-like tragedy at the hands of extremists. “We are merely putting off the time when we will be heartbroken again,” he told Gaffney.

Franks’ response is extraordinary given that even conservatives have given the president credit for eliminating the world’s most wanted terrorist. His concern that Obama will “exploit the issue for political reasons” seems especially cynical and unfounded as the president has gone out of his way to make Bin Laden’s death a non-political event.

Then again, such outlandish accusations are perhaps not surprising coming from a man who once called Obama “an enemy of humanity” for the president’s position on abortion, and has expressed doubts about his birthplace. Two months ago Franks also called for Obama’s impeachment over his decision not to defend the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).

The details of how U.S. intelligence officials put information together to locate Osama bin Laden’s hideout in Pakistan are starting to come out and a lot of attention has been focused on bin Laden’s courier. The New York Times reported yesterday that U.S. interrogators first heard of the Qaeda courier by his nom de guerre, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, in 2002 or 2003, but it wasn’t until 2004 that they discovered what he did:

In 2004, however, a Qaeda operative named Hassan Ghul, captured in Iraq, gave a different account of Mr. Kuwaiti, according to the American official. Mr. Ghul told interrogators that Mr. Kuwaiti was a trusted courier who was close to Bin Laden, as well as to Mr. Mohammed and to Abu Faraj al-Libi, who had become the operational chief of Al Qaeda after Mr. Mohammed’s capture.

Since President Obama announced bin Laden’s death, conservative torture apologists have been arguing that President Bush’s enhanced interrogation techniques (torture) were responsible for nabbing the Al Qaeda leader. As such, the right wing will presumably be aroused by this L.A. Times report today:

The CIA had approved use of sleep deprivation, slapping, nudity, water dousing and other coercive techniques at the now-closed CIA “black site” in Poland where the Pakistani-born detainee, Hassan Ghul, was held, according to a 2005 Justice Department memo, which cited Ghul by name. Two U.S. officials said Wednesday that some of those now-prohibited practices were directed at Ghul.

Torture works! Right? Well not exactly. Later in the L.A. Times article, an unnamed former high level CIA official noted that these torture apologists shouldn’t get too excited:

“I think the issue has been mischaracterized on both sides,” said a former CIA official who was involved in internal debate over the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques program at the time. “The people who say ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ directly led to catching Bin Laden are wrong, and the people who say they had nothing to do with it are also wrong.”

Glenn Calme, a former CIA official who led the interrogation of a high level terror detainee, told ThinkProgress yesterday that, indeed, it is possible that EITs will produce information from time to time. “Does it justify using them?” he asked, “A categorical flat no.” Calme also said that “almost all the information obtained from EITs was recalled…because it was viewed as unreliable,” adding that they “are wrong, illegal, and they don’t work.”

CIA Director Leon Panetta said on Tuesday that “there was some valuable information that were derived through those kinds of interrogations.” But when asked if he thinks Obama’s policy to outlaw torture should be revisited, Panetta replied, “No, I really don’t.”

President Obama will visit the New York site of the 9/11 terrorist attacks today, but former President George W. Bush won’t be at his side. Originally, a Bush spokesperson said the former president declined Obama’s invite because “has chosen in his post-presidency to remain largely out of the spotlight,” though he “appreciated the invite.” This morning, however, the New York Daily News quoted sources saying that Bush won’t be at Ground Zero today because he feels Obama hasn’t given the Bush administration enough credit for the killing of Osama bin Laden:

“[Bush] viewed this as an Obama victory lap,” a highly-placed source told the Daily News Wednesday. [...]

“He doesn’t feel personally snubbed and appreciates the invitation, but Obama’s claiming all the credit and a lot of other people deserve some of it,” the source added.

“Obama gave no credit whatsoever to the intelligence infrastructure the Bush administration set up that is being hailed from the left and right as setting in motion the operation that got Bin Laden. It rubbed Bush the wrong way.”

Obama and Bush spoke briefly after Bin Laden’s death was confirmed, and Bush issued a statement shortly thereafter congratulating him. As ThinkProgress has reported, Obama campaigned on a promise to capture and kill the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks and revived the search for Bin Laden after it had lapsed during the Bush presidency. That hasn’t kept conservatives from offering the former president praise while virtually ignoring Obama, nor has it prevented former Bush administration officials from taking to the press to claim credit for Bin Laden’s death.

A spokesperson for Bush said the former president has plans to visit Ground Zero in September to mark the 10th anniversary of the attacks.