Richard Jewell was a terror suspect. What if the person under torture is innocent?
They'll torture suspected Muslim terrorists today, you tomorrow.
Krauthammer makes a big point of saying terrorists are illegal combatants but he does not advocate torture as a punishment making the point moot. The argument about saving innocent lives could be applied against, say, Air Force pilots, the illegal combatant part is irrelevant. Or they could simply be declared to be illegal combatants or war criminals by dint of belonging to an organization that has killed civilians (which is exactly what happened in Vietnam).
Tough guy encourages tough response. If a guerrilla knows he's going to be executed on capture he may well decide to fight to the death. Same with torture. Relatives of the killed and tortured might then decide to join the guerrillas. Torture didn't stop terrorism in Israel, a wall did, if anything torture upped the ante.
The attempt to separate the military from the torturer is fantasy, they will be considered part and parcel of the same organization.
Well there's torture as defined by this bill and the MSM, and then there's real torture.
The guys in the Hanoi Hilton, and the crew of the USS Pueblo, to name only a few, suffered real physical torture. This bill also prohibits "degrading" treatment. IOW, panties on the head. Blindfolds for travel, maybe orange jumpsuits for all we know. Who knows what an Islamanazi might find degrading? Maybe being guarded by unveiled female guards, with guns, and being driven around by female drivers?
Of course they can't just shoot you or I down on the street, without warning, without giving us a chance to give up. They can't even arrest us without proximate probable cause or an arrest warrant signed by a magistrate. But in wartime, things are a bit different. They can, and do shoot the terrorists, and only need capture them when it's relatively safe to do so. Things are different in wartime, and also different when dealing with foreign enemies rather than US citizens.