> Of course I want to see Pinochet or Kissinger suffer.
Wait a minute, how did we get here?
Andie (and Carrol) was specifically talking about "the torturers" -- neither of these guys ever waterboarded someone. They have other crimes, of course. In the current context, I think the difference is that the people who are doing the torture _believe they are doing something good_ ...
There's a fundamental conflict inside the decision-making hierarchy right now: there are those who believe that 'extreme interrogation techniques' WORK and there are those who believe they do not, and, as such, should be stopped. You can see this in Rudy's wishy-washy-sounding answer to Wolf's question "would you use torture" -- he says "we should use whatever works" and no one quite gets the point. Rudy isn't sure either, but he feels confident that whatever works should be used.
If you listened to the Terry Gross interview, the guy speaking has the correct context. There's a decent amount of anecdotal evidence that the extreme stuff doesn't work, but there's a few examples (mentioned in Suskind's "One Percent Doctrine" for instance) recently of (purportedly) "good" information that has gotten beaten out of some people. The secrecy issues and the inherent non-scientific nature of the activity leads to all kinds of problems in determining what's correct.
This leads to what might be viewed as a tautology: one side believes that there's an objective definition of torture, and it includes the maxim that "torture doesn't work" ... this seems to make sense, because it's inherently objectionable to hurt someone for no gain. The other side says "If it works, it's not torture" -- but when will you know if it works or not in any particular case?
Steven Colbert (again!) makes this point over and over when he says that "We haven't lost in Iraq, because we're still there -- if we leave, then we will have lost."
/jordan