Ever since the Obama Administration  released the memos approving torture, right wingers everywhere have been scrambling to justify it’s use. Laura Ingraham is no exception.

Yesterday on her show, the shock jock gleefully read a report from the Washington Post’s Marc Thiessen which claimed that the Bush Administration’s torture of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed thwarted an attack on The Library Tower of Los Angeles. Ingraham used this report to attack Tim Robbins and Barbara Streisand (even though Ingraham grew up in a wealthier area than both of them; Glastonbury Connecticut) without noting that the plot had been thwarted in 2002, a full year before Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was even captured.

Media Matter chronicles the following question: How could Sheikh Mohammed’s water-boarded confession have prevented the Library Tower attack if the Bush administration “broke up” that attack during the previous year? It couldn’t, of course. Conceivably the Bush administration, or at least parts of the Bush administration, didn’t realize until Sheikh Mohammed confessed under torture that it had already broken up a plot to blow up the Library Tower about which it knew nothing. Stranger things have happened. But the plot was already a dead letter. If foiling the Library Tower plot was the reason to water-board Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, then that water-boarding was more than cruel and unjust. It was a waste of water.