Years ago in these threads we had a debate about the definition of "torture" and what practices should be included under the definition. The word is key to the emotional impact of the debate. It does no good to say, "You are guilty of depriving terrorists of sleep!" You have to first define that as torture, then ditch the qualifications and say, "You are a torturer," so that there is no distinction between what the CIA was doing and what might have been happening in the Tower of London back in the day. It is the same thing as referring to unwanted kissing as rape-- it gets the point across at the expense of clarity. I always go back to the movie Mississippi Burning, in which the Gene Hackman character resorts to what today would be called torture to beat the KKK. He cuts one man, beats another senseless, orchestrates a mock lynching to terrify another into talking, and behaves as an all-around bully to the poor klan members. Is he is a hero? A monster deserving of a prison sentence? A tough cop who may have gone too far in a good cause? It is hard to make a blanket condemnation of the Hackman character because we believe wholly in the purity of his cause and the evilness of the KKK. But in movies or stories where the cop does the same sorts of things but is not necessarily on the side of the good and the pure and his victims not visibly in league with Satan, we see a lot of ambiguity and even cruelty in actions like the cop in Mississippi Burning took. Similarly, those who believe in the rightness of the American cause and the pure evil of Jihad have a more difficult time condemning the CIA without qualification, while those who think America isn't so right and pure and Jihad not so abjectly Satanic seem to have no trouble condemning the CIA in unqualified terms.
What would be genuinely helpful as an alternative to blanket condemnations would be a set of proposals. We catch a terrorist plotting an attack and we know he is a key part of a network planning more attacks. What shall we do? Let him go? If not, what can do beyond asking him nicely to get him to share the information that we know he has and that could very likely save many lives? Anything at all? And if we can do anything at all to get him to talk, what would you say for yourself if what you just approved was later determined by other people to be torture? Because that is, I think, the situation many of these interrogators involved in water-boarding or sleep deprivation techniques find themselves in. They weren't saying torture is okay, they just didn't think they were really torturing.
