I am unable to grant the premise of either side of the controversy on CIA interrogation techniques. The agency's detractors label a variety of techniques--including "face slapping" and forcibly grasping the interviewee's lapels--"torture." Other than waterboarding, the tactics employed by the CIA don't match any reasonable person's definition of torture. And on waterboarding, I think reasonable people can disagree. President Obama's national intelligence director conceded to his employees that the controversial interrogations yielded "high value information." Perhaps, but we just have the intelligence chief's word on this. Do you remember what happened the last time we took an intelligence honcho's word at face value? For the sake of argument, let's grant both premises: that the CIA tortured al Qaeda members and that the tortures resulted in valuable information passed on to U.S. intelligence. The battlefield isn't a philosophy classroom, but the argument here makes me uneasy. The ends don't justify the means. My suspicion is that even Bush cheerleaders who have taken the Left's bait--conceding the interrogation tactics as torture and then reflexively defending torture--realize this at some level. If the ends did justify the means, then waterboarding would be the mildest rather than the most extreme interrogation tactic used.

If it is true that interrogation techniques, defined as torture, yielded information that resulted in the preservation of innocent life; then which would be the greater moral failing - the torture itself, or the results of it's abandonment? This is the question we need to answer.

Hey, do you remember the time when two fully fueled jetliners full of passengers and Islamist Terrorists affiliated with al-Qaeda crashed into the World Trade Center? And remember how thousands of people were murdered along with the destruction of most of lower Manhattan?

And do you remember the time when another jetliner full of passengers and Islamist Terrorists affiliated with al-Qaeda crashed into the Pentagon killing hundreds while destroying a section of that building?

And then there was the time when another jetliner full of passengers and Islamist Terrorists affiliated with al-Qaeda was force crashed into a field in Pennsylvania killing all aboard before it could reach its intended target.

Wouldn't it be awesome if people remembered that?

war is hell. i aint got no problem with torturing these scumbags. they aint soldiers there murderers. and what they know and dont tell will and i say again WILL get people killed. and i hope its someone one of you appeezzers know. see boys and girls, its an ugly world out there. war is hell.

"If the end doesn’t justify the means, what does?" Father John Courtney Murray

The whole movement to stigmatize some means regardless of ends is the fruit of the modern movement to derive morality with "pure reason" and without God. It is logically groundless and culturally suicidal.

Referring to water boarding as torture is a bit like referring to Guantanamo Bay as "the gulag or our time." Guantanamo Bay is neither a Gulag nor is waterboarding torture. There is simply no comparison. The reason "torture" is used to describe waterboarding and other American acts to gather useful intellegence against a mortal enemy and "gulag" is used to describe the prison that holds many of these people is because the words "torture" and "gulag" sound bad. It does not reflect the reality of the sitution but it sounds bad.

A reasonable person could conclude that water boarding and the Guantanamo Bay prison do not serve the national interests, however, to refer to water boarding as "toture" and the Guantanamo Bay prison as a "gulag" adds nothing useful to the debate. In fact, it serves to obscure the real issues.

The purpose of using the word "torture" to describe water boarding is designed to obscure reasoned debate. Its only useful purpose is to demonize Aemrica and its leaders. It forces one to ask are the people who use such terms ideologically blind or are they enemies of the United States?

Finally I wonder how Americans during WWII would have felt had they learned that US forces had captured high value members of the Imperial Japanese or Nazi German forces and we needed valuable information from them and all we did was pour water down their noses. I suspect they would have been outraged that harsher techniques were not used. I'm not sure, was not there then, however, the point is the idea is to totally defeat the enemy not to make him comfortable.