I believe most people are missing the discussion that needs to happen over the issue of "torture". We need to discuss and eventually decide what interogation tactics are permissible and under what circumstances.

As we have the discussion, we need to keep in mind that many times we will be talking about obtaining information that will prevent injury or death to others. The problem is even more complicated because the number of people possibly injured will vary.

To take the most extreme case, a terrorist has been captured that has knowledge of a nuclear weapon some where in New York city. What interogation techniques are permitted to extract that information from him? If we can not extract the information out of him because he does not respond to our 'limited" interogation, hundreds of thousands of people will die. What is acceptable?

The historic reason for conventions on torture, was to deal with prisoners of war. In "classical" war there was a government on each side that could be held accountable for actions taken during war. Who do you hold accountable in a war on terrorism where the terrorist leaders have limited control?

We need a serious discussion that recognizes the realities of terrorism. Terrorist do not just kill "combatants". In fact, they target non-combatants purposely. Are we willing to treat people that kill innocents the same as those that attack soldiers?

I am of the opinion that we need to balance the interogation method (torture if you prefer) with the severity of the outcome and the people being affected. I am aware that not all torture results in reliable information but that is something experts need to work out. For the body politic, we need to lay down the rules of what is and is not acceptable. When hundreds of thousands of innocent lives are at stake, I have no limits. I do not intend to commit suicide nor should our society.

I believe statements I read recently on Washington Post web forums citing a New Republic article calling the tempest over torture "fatuous" grossly misses the point of many of the concerns we liberals have about this.
Two examples: As a child, I grew up in an alcoholic home.
My Dad was the alcoholic. My Mom was the "raging codependent." I got hit by her A LOT! Spatulas; wooden spoons; the belt occasionally; ping pong paddles; rules and yard sticks; switches off the Lilac Tree in the summer; hair brushes; and most often, slapped across the face. That FELT like torture ... felt like ... because this was my Mom and I didn't understand what caused her to love me one minute and whack me around the next.
My Dad hardly EVER hit me. When he did, he knocked me two feet off the floor and sent me sailing against a wall.
Only two or three times. My Mom would often hit me that many times in a single day.
I was "acting out" ... my Dad seemed to just suck up a lot of her abuse. She was mad as hell he wouldn't stop drinking. I was convenient, and because of my own feelings about HIM not standing up to her, my "acting out" was often defiant and rebellious. I wouldn't cry no matter HOW HARD she whacked me with a yardstick, or these other instruments.
It has taken me 40 years for me to say: that was torture.
I'm sure there will be plenty of readers who will ridicule me for claiming that was torture.
Point: Torture is torture when the person being interrogated, or enduring a certain situation, FEELS like he or she is being tortured. NO ONE CAN SAY it doesn't FEEL like torture to the one who suffers, because they aren't on the receving end.
Example Two: I was a rifleman in Vietnam. I was shot on point in the Central Highlands in November, 66. About one month earlier, I picked a rucksack off a dead North Vietnamese body. It had all the guy's pictures, post cards, letters from his family, family photos, etc., in it. Technically, that was a VIOLATION of the Geneva Convention.
So what. He was dead and the U.S. Army pack given me sucked. It didn't carry enough stuff.
When I got shot, on point, I was in the center of two streams of fire.
One, from behind, from the guy who shot me from under fifteen feet (well concealed in jungle). He trimmed the brush down around me trying to "get me" for good. His first round went so close to my left ear lobe I FELT IT. As he fired from his position, a machine gun UP the trail I had been walking, opened up and stream of tracers went no more than two inches off my chest. My right arm was nearly shot off. I KNEW that if I rolled to my right, to get my right arm out from under me, I might die. I lay in a slight erosion rill on the trail. It put me in just enough defilade to NOT be on the surface of the trail I'd walked. Had I not had those simple two or three inches of defilade, I'd have been cut in half.
HOWEVER, I was worried about that pack. And those pictures, post cards, letters. A unit had suffered total death several weeks earlier. All the wounded had been found shot between the eyes. I thought about that and decided, as the machine gun fire subsided, and the guy behind me melted away into the jungle, and friends crawled up to me, that I wasn't going to let some s.o.b. shoot ME between the eyes, if he found me with that pack ... and executed me.
I took a grenade off my web gear, stuck in in my right armpit, where if needed, I could pull the pin with my left hand. It was awkward using the left hand (I am right handed and my right arm was nearly blown off), but I was terrified I'd be executed OR, TORTURED FIRST!
Point? The Geneva Convention has been something the United STATES has adhered to because of our liberty, freedom, dignity, justice, and sense of honor. The Japanese didn't honor it; neither did the Chinese, North Koreans, or North Vietnamese. SO WHAT!!
WE always honored it.
Yes, torture has happened in all our wars, but it has not been systematic, or "sanctioned" by the White House (Alberto Gonzales and his buddies -- no matter what they say they did -- set this in motion. PARTICULARLY Alberto Gonzales, by checking first with Justice, etc.
The incredible short-sightedness of this move towards torture is egregious on the merits of the dignity and history of the United States as a nation of Democracy and honor.
The most damage to come will come soon ... sooner or later.
There are probably some al-Qaeda cells working diligently right now, to monitor American military behavior ... to do their best to capture Americans. And now, with so many women in the military, to capture a unit of mixed sexes.
When Americans are captured this way, they will be rape; sodomized; force to committ homosexual acts; other indignities BEFORE they're beheaded.
It's already OVER.
There is such an event coming up ... we won't know where; we wont know when ... but is foreordained now that it will come. The beheadings of contractors in Iraq clearly was a message to contractors ... since U.S. contractors did some of the torture at Abu Ghrayab and elsewhere (the writer is correct: we hardly know all of the locations it has occured).
Gonzales and his buddies Feith and Cambone and the others (lawyer Yoo) have NEVER BEEN IN COMBAT! The theorists who contend what we have done ISN'T TORTURE, HAVE NEVER been in combat either. Not the ones I've seen writing the articles.
50 years of American adherence to the Geneva Convention, EVEN against the Japanese, who were horrific in their treatment of our prisoners, stands as a testament to our dignity.
We fought the Cold War, for God's sake, and never approved torture against Russian spies!!!! And we WON WW II and the Cold War!
Odd, huh? The two greatest global conflicts in our history and we managed to WIN both with NO systematic torture.
Torture is wrong. It is beneath us.
We CAN elicit answers from terrorists.
Isolation can be a powerful coercive force. Standing, or just being awakened so that sleep is disrupted for days, can persuade. Water-boarding is torture. Humiliation ... being posed giving another man a blow job or hand job ... isn't just a school or fraternity prank.
The people who are made to do that to get into a fraternity ... do it with relish to the next bunch. Else, why would college hazing get out of control (see the Chicago incident where students threw feces and urine and other things on males and females at an after-school party). Ask some of THOSE KIDS how it felt to have feces and urine thrown on them, and them made to roll in it!
Torture is covered in Michael Ignatieff's book, "The Lesser Evil." Read it. It demonstrates that even if a society practices torture in a "national emergency" , without oversight, and time limits, torture can and does corrode the hearts and minds of those who torture.
Finally, wanna bet some of th suicide bombers in Iraq are former Abu Ghrayab prisoners? Because the sexual aspects of what happened there have been used by the Israelis. It was CULTURE specific, designed to humiliate ARAB MALES. To so humiliate them, that they'd "turn" on their buddies, and rat them out to the American intelligence handlers.
NOT. I'd bet money some of these suicide bombers were humiliated; welcomed back by the resistance; told, there is a way you can seek vengance on the Americans; and regain your honor and dignity that THE AMERICANS tried to take from you.
How many Americans do we see blowing themselvse up.
If my theory is correct on the former prisoners becoming suiciders, I'd say: torture backfired.
It's wrong, it's an abomnible practice, and we shouldn't get in it.

Anyone who equivocates between a prisoner being forced to wear a pair of panties on his head, and a prisoner having his tongue cut out, is not deserving of a place in an adult discussion.

Being embarrassed or being scared is not torture. Not even close.