The ugly truth is the wwnjs bent or broke the laws/moral standards of civilized nations. You don’t beat the Nazis by becoming the Nazis.

This whole Jack Bauer ‘if you KNEW the shlub you stopped at a traffic light KNEW where the ticking H-BOMB was, why you’d torture him to death to save millions!’ stuff is beyond ludicrous. That situation is a sheer and utter fiction – you NEVER know when you have that one super duper Bad Guy. And so you start torturing as a matter of course… as a matter of policy. Even the Israelis say torture NEVER works. You get better info from steady, patient humane interrogation.

The damage you have done to America greatly increases the likelihood we will be hit with a WMD, not lessens it.

We executed japanese torturers during WWII for waterboarding our soldiers.

The stain will be a long while in coming out of the fabric of old glory.

After reading these memos, the UN resolution concerning torture, the Geneva conventions etc. I don’t think the Bush administration did anything illegal. Was it immoral? That is up to an individual to decide, same with effective, we all have our own benchmarks for that. One thing I noticed with this interview is both people wanted to discuss how effective torture is perceived to be based on their understanding of the subject but neither seemed to want to talk about how effective it was in this particular case. Victor Davis Hanson said last week that torture isn’t effective for a confession because the subject will tell you what you want to hear to make the pain stop, but it is effective for intelligence gathering because you can verify the results.

Assuming what they did was both legal and effective (or not legal and effective) we still need to decide where to go from here. It seems to me that water boarding and tossing someone against a rubber wall is sort of torture light. But what about real torture? Is it worth pulling someone’s fingernails out to save a half million people in San Francisco? 500 in a small farm town? 1 small girl? 1 nasty looking sex offender? Individually we are all going to have different answers as to the morality of those questions, varying from none of the above to all the above. So how do we balance those moralities into public policy, one variable is the effectiveness.