I am likely to get some dings for this, but I feel the need to strongly disagree with many of the people here and Charles.

Without getting into an elaborate psuedo-legal debate about what is and is not torture. I should note from the start that Gen MacArthur, not known for being left wing, hanged Japanese for waterboarding our troops after the Second World War. Graphic descriptions of waterboardings of our men were heard in the Tokyo trials. Please look it up. These fell under count 54.

Interestingly enough, a little while back, a fellow lizard linked to a great old movie (from the Sixties) with Alec Guinness called Echos of Glory. The new colonel of the regiment was psychologically scarred to say the least. He had been tortured by the Germans. They had waterboarded him. He describes the sure certainty that he was droning and going to die with terrible effect.

After the second World War, there was no question from the military or even from a general movie audience that this was a terrible thing. The CIA wouldn’t do it to interrogate those prisoners if it was nice.

Now I do not want to get into a relativism debate about “is it worse than the rack?” Let’s say that I grant you that it is not as terrible as some other things we have done to each other as a species. Maybe it is just the foreplay to “real torture.” Perhaps. But even if I grant you that, we are supposed to be the good guys.

If you act like good guys and the enemy knows that you behave like the good guys, then they are more likely to surrender. If they think that they will be abused in your hands, they are more likely to fight to the last man. This gets more of our guys killed as well as more of them. It is not clear to me at all that the potential cost in lives of this policy was offset by the value of any intelligence we received.

Further, we are supposed to be the good guys. The good guys don’t even do the foreplay to bad. They would not so stain their honor.

I find this whole thing a national tragedy.