I have to admit that I find the "debate" over torture very puzzling. Certainly, there are excellent reasons to say that the very word "debate" on the issue of torture is unacceptable on its face: that the practice is so morally repugnant that the very application of the cold logic of debate to the issue is itself an insult to our shared humanity.
But even if we are to take the extraordinary step of acknowledging the legitimacy of argument on a practice as repellent as torture, it is difficult to see that the debate is terribly complex. In fact, it's extremely simple.
Any debater worth their salt must be prepared to effectively argue either side of a question, dissociated from their individual emotions, biases and feelings on the issue. One cannot effectively eviscerate the other side of an argument without understanding it inside and out, prepared to argue the other position more effectively than its own advocate.
When considering the other side of the torture debate, however, the arguments are so weak and so simplistic that they boil down to one of two, mutually exclusive options. And each of these options are so flimsy that it is incredible that they are given the time of day on national television.
1. The practices allowed under the Bybee memo are not torture.
Believe it or not, this is actually the weaker of the two arguments. So obvious is it that waterboarding someone six times per day while denying them sleep for days on end is, in fact, torture, that only lawyers and political leaders aware of the legal consequences of accepting the word "torture" to describe the practice even attempt to deny it. And in fact, few regular conservatives on the street would actually deny this point.
The definition of torture is in many ways like that of pornography: you know it when you see it. When even Shep Smith of Fox News looks incredulously at his interlocutor and asks, "Have you actually read the memo?", you know it's over. If you haven't seen the clip yet, it's a must see.
When even Judith Miller and Shepherd Smith find it self-evident that the practices in question are torture, the debate on the issue is over. People realize it's torture. Almost no one in the conservative movement would argue that these practices would be acceptable even for serial killers in America's prisons.
From the legal point of view, of course, that should be the end of the argument. Laws were broken, and the guilty must be punished.
But from a political point of view, the other argument in favor of torture is the more compelling one, and the one that is actually the more oft-used refuge of the conservative. It's the greater goods argument in favor of torture:
2. Torture is a necessary evil to prevent the greater evil of a terrorist attack.
This the argument that the embattled Clifford May in the Fox News clip above makes after being backed into a corner: that his conscience would be shocked more by the loss of thousands of American lives, than by whatever may happen to one of the detainees.
Now, there are of course many simple, fact-based arguments against this line of thinking. The first and most obvious is that torture doesn't work. And then, of course, there's the question of original sin: the fact that the torture was instigated not to extract information about terror attacks, but to fabricate a link between 9/11 and Saddam Hussein.
But the problem with arguing over the pure efficacy of torture is that it allows conservatives to muddy the waters over what information may have been extracted by torture or by other means. More importantly, our reptilian brains instinctively have this misguided notion, reinforced incessantly in pop culture, that torturing bad guys can help extract valuable information.
There is an easier, more deductively simple way to demolish the greater good argument. If you beg the question by assuming that the torture victim actually has time-sensitive, valuable information to extract, and you allow the application of a utilitarian argument comparing the treatment of a detainee with the deaths of thousands, there is literally no torture of a detainee that should not be acceptable.
Given Sophie's Choice between the certain loss of a thousand American lives and waterboarding a detainee, waterboarding is acceptable on its face.
But so is pulling out his fingernails with pliers. So is extracting his eyeball with a spoon. If you acknowledge the scenario, any treatment of the detainee is justifiable. That is the cold, inescapable logical end result of this line of thinking.
If you really want to stymie a conservative, don't argue about whether it's torture or not: that much is obvious. Don't argue that torture doesn't work: that gets fuzzy, and our guts tell us otherwise, even as the evidence backs us up.
Ask them why the contents of the Bybee memos are OK, but pulling out fingernails with pliers is not.
They're both torture (if they attempt to argue this point, it's already over). And if American lives are at stake, what's the difference?
It's a logical trap for them from which there is literally no escape.