Here is my first-ever piece for a new website, The Commentator, looking at some of the tired and/or snide arguments against the US action against Osama Bin Laden which are now busily infiltrating the BBC and other parts of the British media.

Including this passage, on where the Prime Minister hit a clearly wrong note this morning, on our favourite subject of torture:

Prime Minister David Cameron this morning on BBC Radio 5 Live parked himself on an unwise policy position on this issue, namely that one of the main reasons for opposing torture is that information obtained from torture is ‘unreliable’. This is exactly wrong: people commit torture precisely because the information thereby obtained can be not only reliable but vital.

It is likely to become clear (enough) that a key part of the evidence trail leading to Bin Laden did indeed come from "enhanced interrogation" techniques. Some reports are making the good point that the information given by different suspects was so unambiguous in pointing away from one possible Bin Laden courier that it made the Americans look more closely at that person.

In other words, the information given was indeed ‘unreliable’ and intended to be so by the tough suspects who were desperate to lead their captors away from the right trail – but the very pattern of unreliable information itself gave new clues, which in the end proved decisive.

Listening to the Prime Minister and someone from Amnesty International on the radio this morning, it was fascinating how both for their different reasons tried to hide behind the "we do not know all the facts so I can’t comment" line. The interviewer openly scoffed at the Amnesty equivocations over whether it was a good thing (or not) that OBL had been shot on the spot.

My basic point in the Commentator piece?

These issues and more immediately play into US domestic politics. Before President Obama was elected the elite Joint Special Operations Command troops used by him to carry out this brilliant mission were noisily denounced by leading US liberals as the Bush/Cheney ‘executive assassination ring’.

We can expect to be deafened by the silence from his supporters now that Obama himself has used these soldiers and relied on some grubby Bush/Cheney-era intelligence to achieve this deserved political success.

But Obama must tread carefully. His core argument that he is the moral and political Anti-Bush has just fallen away.