My “emotional” response:
Torture dehumanizes both the torturer and the tortured. It is in violation of “the golden rule” which exists in various forms in every religious/spiritual tradition. It is immoral. (There is no such thing as “torture that’s not so bad.”) Even though American POW’s have been tortured in the past, the US could always claim its moral superiority and objection, and punish those who used it. In some cases, maybe our previous stance has even prevented torture. Now that the Bush administration has made torture “policy,” we can no longer make that moral claim. My young son is a soldier, did a tour of duty driving a hummer in the Sunni Triangle. If he, or any other soldier were captured and tortured, the torturers could do so without condemnation, as the US government would be labeled “hypocrites.” Does anyone remember the response of “the terrorists” after the revelations of ABU Ghraib?? That’s when they started chopping off the heads of captured foreigners. I don’t think people realize just what we have lost. I, for one, am F+++++G furious!!! Cheney/Bush have betrayed our military. And broken the law.

My rational response:
Torture doesn’t work. Even conservatives who have experienced torture as POWs have said so. WWII interrogators have reported they received better, and correct, intel from the nazi’s while playing cards with them, than pouring water down their throats. People who feel unbearable pain or feel as though they are going to die will say anything to make it stop. The info they give is often false and/or unreliable. The risk taken to use torture was greater than the risk to find other ways to gather info. Cheney/Bush did it their own, brutal way, and we will all pay the price for it.

I don’t think the FOX news hack had to wonder if they were going to stop or not.

And yes I knew about the Sheik, and no, that doesn’t change anything. It’s still wrong.

BTW, did you read the link to the article that said they waterboarded Khalid Sheik Mohammed for 90 seconds and his revelations helped arrest at least 6 major terrorists.

And yet you refer to waterboarding a couple comments before as:

pouring water over someone’s face

If that’s all it is, Khalid was hardly the tough guy he’s made out to be, eh?

Pouring water over somebody’s face would likely get them to laugh at you. Waterboarding is drowning them, then making sure they don’t actually die by drowning. Playing this off as no bif deal on the one hand, but incredibly effective on the other doesn’t fit.

I don’t doubt that you can sometimes (although clearly not reliably) get information from someone by torturing them. You could no doubt also get information from them by raping and mutilating their loved ones in front of them.

I don’t think that’s the issue. Why? Because both are immoral.

Or are there no moral values that can be sacrificed in the name of standing up to the liberals (who are, of course, supposedly without morals)

This is a false assumption I think. I’m no expert on interrogation, but the interrogator has at his or her disposal any number of techniques that are proven to work at getting real, useful, actionable intelligence from just about any person…deception, cohersion, simpathy, etc. (I’m sure there are others). These techniques work; torture does not get you real, actionable intelligence. It gets you whatever you want to hear, which a lot of times may not be the truth. Ever been questioned by the authorities? These people know what they are doing.
We all use some form of morality to make judgements about what to do in our own lives. Where you get your morality just might be a little different from where I get mine. Murder is wrong; it is therefore illegal. It’s wrong, IMO, because I myself would not want to be murdered. It just doesn’t make good sense to me to allow people to wander around murdering each other willy-nilly…society would break down in that kind of world. The whole “do unto others as you would have them do onto you” just makes sense to me no matter whether you think it came from the lips of God or not.
Waterboarding is *not* just “pouring water over someone’s face” for “90 seconds”…it’s simulated drowning. The person that is really being waterboared isn’t some dopey “journalist” that knows that the waterflow will stop just before he or she dies. Would you like to be drowned? I’m guessing the answer is no, which is why I think it’s wrong. Imagine how much more information “KSM” (as I’ve heard many conservatives call him – as if they are on a first name, buddy-buddy basis with him…lol…) would have given us if we treated him like a human being? And no, my heart does not bleed for the man…

Is this not true? It seems to go against your assertions.

Just out of curiosity, where is my faulty logic. Could you point it out? I always thought I was pretty good at logic. I know it has been a while, but I did get an A+ when I took it in college.

What are you talking about? It’s hard to defend anything to you, because you don’t do the ‘logic’ thing very well.

Imagine you are in charge of the government and you have detained a high-level official in a terrorist network, who absolutely will not talk, despite having information on current plots to kill hundreds or thousands of Americans. Can you really substitute your judgment of what is or is not civilized, or is it your duty to protect the American citizens?

If I had a weak conscience that I could live with torturing this guy with a high likelihood he’ll either give me false info or none at all(which is mostly the case), sure, torture away. But that’s not me, I’m a better human than that.

No, we don’t torture. Period. Nazis tortured. Saadamm Ba’athists tortured. Idi Amin tortured. Torquemada the Grand Inquisitor tortured. I don’t want to, or think that Americans should be anywhere near those class of people. Period.