Second, of course waterboarding is torture. It was invented by Chinese torturers and practiced on our men in Korea and Vietnam, and we prosecuted people for war crimes for doing it, when we could. It was added to sear training as a mild taste of the torture captives routinely experienced at the hands of barbarians. The men who implemented it did so *as* torture. It is of course much milder when brief and the subject knows friends not remorseless enemies are doing it and will soon stop. But it is torture and everyone who wants to use it, knows it is and claims it is "effective" precisely as torture. If it were poking with soft cushions, no one would defend it as effective, would they?
You simply may not seek victory in war by making your captives as uncomfortable as possible. The means and details are quite immaterial, you can't seek the end. You can offer leniency or preferable treatment or release in return for cooperation if you find it useful. But captives are free moral agents and not sacks of meat for you to tenderize. The war will not be won in a torture chamber. It may well be lost there (France's in Algeria was, for one), but it can't be won there. It will be won only out where there is honor, on actual battlefields.
And no, torturers are not protecting the country. They are attacking it and covering it with their moral slime. They belong in jail, but I'll settle for simply running them out of any office or position of trust or responsibility.
And this has nothing to do with any terrorist's rights, it has everything to do with mine. You are not authorised to torture human beings in my name or claim to be doing so on my behalf. You are my enemy and not my countryman, if you defend barbarism. If you torture anyone, it is as a self appointed tyrant and illegitimate; you have no commission to do so from the American people. Your crimes are yours and not theirs, and nothing you say or do will make us support you in those crimes.
Long-term, if we lose the moral high ground we lose everything. America must stand for something or she loses her meaning.
The moral is to the physical as three to one. - Napoleon Bonaparte
JasonC -
Congress debated the very issue of Enhanced Interrogation Techniques, and never passed a resolution prohibiting the enhanced interrogation techniques. The fact that the issue is so debatable, very hotly contested, and still unresolved means that your insistance on declaring in no uncertain terms is based not on fact, but emotion.
You keep insisting that persons outside of the Geneva Convention be accorded Geneva Convention treatments - when it clearly is not a requirement. To insist that it is the law now, when it is not - is wrong. It also violates an even more basic fundamental right against ex post facto laws. You may not criminalize what was debatably not criminal - and the fact that Congress has not yet passed laws clearly establishing different standards is proof that the criminality you suggest is not there.
As some Supreme Court Justice stated (during the Civil War) that the Constitution is not a suicide pact, we should also assume that the standards of treatment that constitute civilized behavior is not a suicide pact that must be adhered to when dealing with illegal combatants and terrorists. Geneva Convention accords were established to ensure fair treatment of captured legal combatants on both sides of an engagement. The Japanese were prosecuted after the war because they mistreated Prisoners of War who should have been treated IAW Geneva Convention (even though Japan was not a signatory to the convention.)
Ultimately, a civilized society may and should do what it must to secure victory and protect its society. If society enacts laws prohibiting enhanced interrogation techniques (something that they still have not yet done!) - then yes, by the rule of law, THEN it would be a criminal act to waterboard a terrorist to stop a suitcase nuke. But the society also has the ability to turn on a dime, and throw out the politicians who failed in their primary duty to protect society, and the people can reverse their stupidity and permit what needs to be done so that we don’t enter into suicide pacts that assure our destruction!