The Bill of Rights includes the 8th Amendment, which states, in full:
Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.
Let's talk about this below the orange squiggle.
I'll admit that I think the 8th Amendment is far too imprecise. How much is excessive? What is cruel and unusual? These are frightfully ambiguous and vague. The courts have ruled on these points, and the DoJ has written memos to try to define them. They are attempting to identify when it's OK to do something completely immoral. My definition is fairly broad: Torture is the intentional infliction of physicial pain or mental anguish. There's no defining how much is OK. None of it is OK.
It doesn't matter to me why the Bush Administration decided that it was OK to torture people.
It doesn't matter to me that their "justification" was that "the world changed" after 9/11.
It doesn't matter to me that they lied about whether or not torture was effective in preventing terrorism.
It doesn't matter to me what forms of torture they used. None of them are any better than any others, and as far as I'm concerned, indefinite detention is just as much a torture technique as waterboarding.
It doesn't matter to me that there are many negative consequences to torture. There are no potential positive consequences but there are plenty of very bad potential outcomes. Any potential or perceived negative consequences simply aren't the issue. So while everyone is commenting about how "enhanced interrogations" were wrong because such methods are ineffective, I would prefer to remember that torture is wrong. Period.
What matters to me is that our government tortured. Torture is wrong. Period. It doesn't matter in the slightest that a million people might die if Prisoner X doesn't tell us how to defuse a bomb. Torturing Prisoner X is wrong.
I have seen a few snippets today about the release of the redacted Executive Summary of the torture investigation report. I haven't noticed that any of them have mentioned the simple fact that torture is immoral. I hope I just overlooked it because I'm at work and only skimmed a few articles while on a break.
President Bush and Vice President Cheney claim to be Christian. I'm an atheist, and I haven't studied the Bible, although I've read some of it. I'm aware of some of what Jesus was purported to have said. I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure he didn't advocate torture.
I think that torture is an unAmerican and inhuman act, and that people who advocate it, let alone perpetrate it, should be tried for treason.