It's bad enough that corporate media are having such an ill-informed debate about whether torturing some prisoners helped find Osama bin Laden. But considering whom the media invite to this debate, it's probably not a surprise. Take yesterday's Sunday shows (please!).

On NBC's Meet the Press, Obama national security adviser Thomas Donilon basically refused to take a definitive position on torture, waterboarding and intelligence.  "No single piece of intelligence led to this," was his line. They followed up with a segment with former CIA head Michael Hayden and Rudy Giuliani, both of whom basically endorsed the idea that torture worked.

On CBS's Face the Nation, Donald Rumsfeld declared that these tactics worked.

Fox News Sunday had an "exclusive" with Dick Cheney, which followed a pretty contentious interview with Donilon. Cheney did not surprise.

On ABC's This Week, torture advocate Liz Cheney was on the roundtable to say exactly what you'd expect.  ("That debate is over. It worked. It got the intelligence. It wasn't torture. It was legal.")  This came after host Christiane Amanpour seemed to overstate the White House's view, saying that that Obama officials have admitted that waterboarding "did, in fact, yield fruitful information in the hunt for Osama bin Laden."

But give ABC credit for having a  critic of torture on their show.  Former Washington Post reporter Tom Ricks said this:

I never thought I'd live in a country where we would debate whether we should endorse torture as an official policy. Was some information obtained through torture? Probably yeah. Could it have been obtained through more professional methods the intelligence professionals recommended? Almost certainly yes. We could have gotten it sooner and better.

Also, what we know is that the use of torture became the prime recruiting tool for Al Qaida and for insurgents in Iraq, and so directly resulted in the death of American troops.

The New York Times stuck it to the former Defense secretary in a Sunday magazine interview:

People sometimes call you a war criminal. Does that bother you?

For the record, Rumsfeld did seem slightly bothered, because it's "totally untrue. And life goes on."

The New York Times' Week in Review section yesterday (11/23/08) gathered a group of op-eds under the heading "Transitions," which they described as "a series of Op-Ed articles by experts on the most formidable issues facing the new president." The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were the topics under examination; we've examined who gets to weigh in on such matters before.

The Times yesterday ran seven pieces. Readers were treated to the thoughts of ex-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmad Chalabi (who, you might remember, peddled many of the false stories about Iraqi WMD) and leading neo-con Fred Kagan from the American Enterprise Institute. Also contributing was Peter Mansoor (a former executive officer to General David Petraeus) and Anthony Cordesman, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic & International Studies who was a somewhat reluctant supporter of the Iraq War.

Another Times contributor, author Rory Stewart, also initially supported the Iraq War; he now questions the wisdom of a "surge" in Afghanistan. The final perspective permitted in the Times was that of Linda Robinson, a former reporter at U.S. News & World Report who recently wrote a book about David Petraeus.

In other words, of the seven perspectives offered by the Times, three were enthusiastic Iraq hawks (in the cases of Rumsfeld and Chalabi, that's an understatement).  One other-- Cordesman-- was an important voice in elite foreign policy debate who supported the invasion. Another contributor worked for Petraeus. Those perspectives are "balanced," so to speak, by a pro-invasion author and a journalist who seems to advocate a rather middle-of-the-road perspective.

Where were the critics who opposed the Iraq War? Those who advocate a more rapid pace of U.S. troop withdrawal? How about someone who cautioned against the invasion of Afghanistan? Those thinkers are out there, of course; they just don't seem to make it into the New York Times very often.