Torture has two victims? Please. I suppose then one could say the fire bombing of Dresden was for all practical purposes an attempt to torture an entire population into 'giving something up' and therefore in a sense the crews of those planes and the officers who ordered the tactics were war criminals whose souls were lost to evil. If I don't believe what I'm doing is wrong then how am I to be corrupted by it? Of course I can be, that's obvious, but I won't necessarily be. I can kick in a door in Ramadi in the middle of the night and see a flash of metal in the shadows and fire instinctively and then when the lights are turned on find I've killed a harmless old woman - am I evil? I tell myself that war is an imperfect violence focused for the purposes of getting someone to do something they don't want to do and therefore I'm not evil - and essentially I'd be right. The torture question is full of flawed logic and definitions and motives on both sides.
Laws give the illusion that actions are understood, and it's a necessary illusion - but I think Kafka demonstrated just how absurd an illusion it can be. We want things to be black and white because that simplifies our choices - but the reality is the world is full of grey. As a somewhat free and open society that tends to respect the rights of individuals we have a fairly good notion of what torture is, but less so of what it isn't and it would be helpful to the debate if people would stop declaiming as if that weren't the case. Drawing and quartering? I think we can all agree that's torture - a real threat of death and disfigurement, pretty sure that's torture. Sleep deprivation? Throwing someone up against a wall? You can really sit there and say that a well meaning person who argues a difference between harsh interrogation and torture has been corrupted to evil?
The good Lt Colonel intimates a clash between Kant and Hume but doesn't pursue it - and for good reason: Hume wins. We want to believe in absolutes but reality is far too bitter a thing for that - and the reality is whoever was in charge of the White House on 9/11 - I think we can all accept at this point it was Cheney - sensed an existential threat to the very idea of America and that any show of weakness could prove fatal and from that animus you get enhanced interrogation techniques. It wasn't evil incarnate - it was a perfectly reasonable response. Flawed? Yes, of course - just as the reasoning that is repelled by it is flawed as well.
