How do you feel about torture?

Here's how I feel about torture: don't do it.

Simple, huh?

Is this a great country? Seriously. What makes a country great? Personally, I think the things embodied in the U.S. Constitution are a pretty good start. The preamble says that we the people established the Constitution in order to "secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity." That is something that makes a country pretty great - that the very document establishing the government acknowledges that one of the primary motivating factors is to ensure liberty will be enjoyed by those founding the country as well as all future generations.

The Bill of Rights contains some things that are pretty great, too. Freedom of speech. Freedom of religion. Freedom to assemble. Freedom to petition the government for redress of our grievances. Freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures.

Those things could make a country great. What else? How about shying away from torturing people? Sure, avoiding something evil doesn't make you a great person. You don't get any points in my book just because you managed to get through the day without killing anyone. But when applied to a government, it is pretty important to know that the government will not engage in evil acts - no matter how noble the intentions. Those are reasons we used to justify invading Iraq, after all. After his WMD argument dried up, Bush claimed another good reason for invading was to end the torture and rape and killings Saddam inflicted on his people. So if those things are justification for invading another country, avoiding those things sounds like something a great country ought to do.

There are some things we must avoid. Torture is one of them. Nothing, not even preventing another 9/11, justifies torture. We are better than that. We value some things too highly to allow them to occur, even if we think lives might be saved if we allowed them.

Is it possible we could uncover a terrorist plot to kill Americans if we tortured a suspect? Some people argue the effectiveness of torture, but it probably works in some cases. Torture might save lives. What about rape? Could we convince a suspect to talk if we used rape as a tool? Maybe a terrorist doesn't care about his personal well-being. Maybe he would care about seeing his mother raped. Or his children. Maybe a terrorist would talk if we raped his kids in front of him. Or tortured them. Or killed them. Maybe genocide could prevent a terrorist attack. Maybe they would stop killing us if we just killed them all off first. If torture is okay to save lives, why not rape? Why not murder of innocents? Why not genocide? Why not every evil thing we can think of?

How do you feel knowing we, you and me through our duly-elected president, are laying the foundation for a legal justification for torture? What else are we doing we don't know about?

How do you feel about torture?