So the infamous torture memos came out and as was expected, they were greeted with the right and left sprinting to the extremes. As usual, the truth lies in the middle and, by moving to their far left/right, many people and pundits are running away from common sense. While the Left is denouncing sleep deprivation and putting a bug in a room with someone who's afraid of bugs, the right is defending everything.

To me, a prisoner of war is going to face some hostility. After all, the word "war" is in there and that's going to raise the level of acceptable treatment as opposed to a prisoner of the State. I try to judge things by what would I find unacceptable treatment if our courageous troops had to face it. Sleep deprivation and modified diets seem like a given for a prisoner of war. The issue of the bug would only cross the line if say a person who allergic to bees and you stuck him in a room with bees. In that case, you're putting the soldier's life in danger. I also think telling him that the bug is poisonous is crossing the line. It's like sticking a gun to the the head of a suspect; it doesn't matter if it is loaded or not, it's crossing the line either way. However, if the person just doesn't like insects, I really don't think sticking an insect in with them is tantamount to torture.

When you start to discuss physical violence, however, you start to enter the gray area. I expect American soldiers to face some beatings but I think if you are beating someone to the point of unconsciousness, then you are crossing the line. Waterboarding is an obvious torture method and I really don't understand how anyone can defend it. 

In an interview on The O'Reilly Factor, Karl Rove defended the procedure citing that the US always had medical people standing by. While he thinks that's a defense, I see that as an admission of guilt. Maybe it's me but if you are doing something that makes you think "You know, we should probably have a doctor around just in case." then you are crossing the line. Again, it's like putting a gun in a man's face. Threatening to kill someone (which is what "simulated drowing" is) is a step too far.

The conservative response is that waterboarding helped get quality information out of prisoners. This is not a legitimate argument. You could also get great information if you kidnapped the person's family and threatened to kill them in front of the prisoner. Obviously that's an extreme example but it goes to show that there's a difference between effective and moral. What made America great was that we never blurred that line. We stood by our morals even if it made things more difficult. We didn't take the easy road and then try to rationalize our misdeeds later.

I'm torn on whether White House officials should stand trial for these errors in judgement (that might have been outright war crimes) but I think, at the very least, there needs to be a full fledged Congressional investigation into what happened and how we let it happen. I know that this might not be the justice that people on the Left are crying for or the maintaining of the status quo that the right seems to favor but we need to make sure that this type of thing never happens again and that America doesn't sink to the levels of our foes.