Of course, a major battle is lost: The mainstream press says “methods that critics call torture”

This. Will. Be. Blogged.

April 27 (Reuters) – A nearly three-year-long investigation by Senate Intelligence Committee Democrats is expected to find there is little evidence the harsh “enhanced interrogation techniques” the CIA used on high-value prisoners produced counter-terrorism breakthroughs.

People familiar with the inquiry said committee investigators, who have been poring over records from the administration of President George W. Bush, believe they do not substantiate claims by some Bush supporters that the harsh interrogations led to counter-terrorism coups.

The backers of such techniques, which include “water-boarding,” sleep deprivation and other practices critics call torture, maintain they have led to the disruption of major terror plots and the capture of al Qaeda leaders.

One official said investigators found “no evidence” such enhanced interrogations played “any significant role” in the years-long intelligence operations which led to the discovery and killing of Osama bin Laden last May by U.S. Navy SEALs.

We have plenty of protocols we use for segregating information that are used every day. Make no one person has all the information required to find and defuse the bomb is easy. Further, if you really, really mean for a bomb to go off, you don’t add a deactivation code to the design, as Makoto pointed out.

This is the most persuasive scenario anyone can come up with to justify torture, and it’s not even remotely plausible. It assumes terrorists are stupid; they aren’t. It assumes torture is infallible; it isn’t. The only purpose torture serves is to satisfy the blood lust of the torturer.

If terrorists don’t want to be tortured then maybe they need to, oh I dunno, STOP being terrorists and end their war against us maybe?

This of course assumes that everyone waterboarded was,in fact, a terrorist.
This wasn’t the case.
Is it moral vanity or consistency to object to a technique that we as a country called torture when it was performed on our troops?
And again, the whole point is that it is debatable that it actually saved any lives, much less the murky “many” to which the former administration keeps alluding.
John McCain(no friend to those morally vain peacenicks) stood on the floor and refuted the idea that waterboarding led to any useful information.That to my mind makes it worth examining the idea rather than giving an automatic pass to people who have a vested interest in making sure that we don’t call it torture until the statute of limitations runs out.

We did not start this war or want it to happen but its the reality.

War pretty much by definition is hellish and ugly and not at all nice and forces us toconfront some very grim and horrid necessities and do some very nasty things.

I don’t like this – but I accept that it is the stark, sad reality.

If terrorists don’t want to be tortured then maybe they need to, oh I dunno, STOP being terrorists and end their war against us maybe?

That first line is meant to read :

This whole torture to save innocent lives is a tough ethical issue.

Plus later its :

Its very easy, too easy perhaps, to sit back in the comfort of your home and computer safe and sound and call him and those like him monsters.

I think we need to ask ourselves here :

Is our moral vanity worth more than who knows how many innocent peoples lives?

The Jihadists are not good or reasonable people – do they really deserve our sympathy and even rhetorical support?

Is waterboarding torture. Yup.

Is torture immoral? Yeah.

Did it save innocent lives? Almost certainly.

Does that make it worthwhile? Maybe.

It is very easy to condemn Jose Rodriguez and those like him. Its very easy, too easy perhaps, to sit back in the comfort of your home and computer safe and sound and callhimand thsoe like him monsters.

Thing is that he and those like him may have saved your life may have saved thousands – even millions – of other innocent lives.

What the CIA interrogators did might very well, heck probably was ethically wrong and cruel and awful and unpleasant. It might also have been necessary to gain vital information and save people’s lives that would otherwise have been killed in further terrorist attacks.

By mistreating really nasty, evil monsters such as Khalid Sheik Mohammad who planned the 9-11 atroctities among many others.

It is very hard to have any sympathy for what happened to Khalid Sheik Mohammd and the other Jihadist terrorists who, I’d say, deserve far worse than any limited torture and ultimately humane capital punishment we can give them.

Yes, there’s a lot of question marks and uncertainties here and much we probably don’t, won’t and shouldn’t know.

You call Jose Rodriguez a “torturing monster” which is up to you.

Yet you may well owe him your life and the lives of those you care about – and thus thanks and gratitude for doing what I don’t think you and certainly not I could do in order to save who knows how many others.