There are many problems with current Republican arguments in favor of torture. Aside from the purely legal problems, their moral argument doesn't hold water for me. But, before getting to that, I'd like to offer a simple definition of torture since most Republicans are trying to obfuscate whether waterboarding and other acts even constitute torture. My definition is: If we would object to it being done to one of our own soldiers, then it is torture. So, if Republicans do not object to those Americans fighting in Afghanistan being waterboarded by the Taliban, or by rogue elements in Iraq, then okay. I will accept that they truly don't believe waterboarding to be torture. However, if they would view such treatment of Americans as torture, then it is torture for everyone else as well. Period.

Once we can agree on what is torture we can move the debate forward to whether it is ever moral to use torture, and if so, under what circumstances? It seems to me, that the Cheney/GOP moral position on torture boils down to; "the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few". Republicans ask; what patriotic American wouldn't trade the physical pain of some terrorist to save the lives of Americans? The extreme example trotted out is one where we are holding someone we are SURE is a terrorist and who has just hidden a nuke in NYC. The clock is ticking, and so, government officials acting out the ultimate duty of a patriot, torture that KNOWN terrorist to save the city. Actually, I might do the same myself if such a pure and dire scenario were clearly the situation, I don't truly know. However, I see no need ever for a torture POLICY. All that I can see which might ever be needed is for the President to personally and clearly issue a written executive order for some very specific individual circumstance only in a national emergency. Such an order should be fully on record and, soon after, unclassified so that the American people and history can judge the circumstances involved.  

I strongly suspect that records will show, however, that the Bush/Cheney administration used torture as a policy mostly to conduct intelligence fishing expeditions. I believe that they used torture to get whomever they happened to have picked up to admit they were guilty of something, anything, whether they were or not. Furthermore, I believe that was done simply because we had the power to it, and because absolutely no value was placed on the humanity of the victims. Torture, I have no doubt, more often elicited confessions of guilt from the innocent than it obtained life and death information from the guilty. That was no different than how torture was used at the Salem witch trials. This was dark ages stuff ordered by the administration. That, is the first problem I have with a policy of torture.

The second problem I have with a policy of torture is the increasingly dark street it leads down. If, by torturing one person, we would save the lives of many persons, then maybe, torture is, in fact, morally justifiable. Maybe, the ends do justify the means. That certainly is the essence of the argument Dick-moral compass-Cheney is making. If, however, we were to agree with Cheney, that the ends do justify the means and that the needs of the many do outweigh the needs of the few, then why stop at only torturing some (presumed) terrorist? Why not torture his wife as well, if we believe it will "save American lives"? Would Cheney no longer agree that saving many American lives is worth the pain of some (presumed) terrorist's wife? If not, why not? Maybe, torturing the terrorist's children would make him tell us what we want to hear even faster, thereby, saving even more American lives. Could Cheney then credibly argue that thousands of American lives wouldn't be worth it? It's just the child of terrorist scum after all. If the ends justify the means then any means are justified. Right, Mr. Cheney?

At the end of this debate, and has been pointed out by others, this really isn't about our enemies and their values, it's about us and our values. Republicans like to talk about our American history of courageous revolutionary patriots, and frontiers men and women, and about our national traditions and heritage. What Republicans want to ignore is that such brave people didn't take the safe route. They risked greatly to found and build the kind of nation they wanted to live in. Patrick Henry didn't say; give me liberty, but only if I don't have to risk death. What would those founding Americans think of today's cowardly Republicans? Probably the same as they thought about them back then, as the conservatives of their day were arguing that we should remain an English colony, and that was mostly because they were making good money off the Crown. It seems some things never change.