Reply #26: Torture isn't a black-and-white thing.

[Occam Bandage]

Soldiers are supposed to disobey unlawful orders, yes. There is a clear difference between "shoot that unarmed woman" and "do not shoot that unarmed woman."

But in cases like interrogations, there aren't natural lines provided by nature or the conscience. There are dozens and dozens of potential interrogation techniques. Some, such as dismemberment, are obviously torture. Some, such as bright lights, are obviously not torture. And most fall in between somewhere. Waterboarding is famous because it seems to fall more or less between the two--many see it as torture, and some others do not. It does not cause permanent injury (anyone at risk of being captured, such as fighter pilots, is waterboarded as part of their training), but it is psychologically terrifying. On the other hand, manipulating a person's psyche to the point of breaking it is the very intent of interrogation. And on the other hand, some acts are excessively traumatizing to the point where the infliction of trauma seems to be the primary result. Sorting through this is not something that is so easy to do that one could expect that everyone who is not a psychopath would come up with the exact same list of what interrogation methods are torture and which are not.

To decide what is and what isn't torture, then, the DOJ had its teams of legal experts analyze and draw up definitions: clear, black-and-white guidelines as to what precisely was legal and what precisely was not. One of the methods in particular, waterboarding, was found to be legal. The new President has declared that it is not legal after all. Prosecuting CIA agents for accepting the DOJ's analysis seems a bit unfair to me.