There are many times when the ends do require the means. They don't justify them since they are still wrong.
Sometimes there are times that we would forgo the use of a useful tool for a higher payoff. We do not torture others soldiers nor they ours because we have made an agreement not to mutually so that wars will not be too horrific.
Giving up the useful information that could be gained from torturing soldiers is given up because the ends of a less horrible war justify the means of a geneva convention.
The terrorists have no such agreement with us and we have no expectation that they would abide by one to make a less horrible war so there is no need to give up torture for this reason.
I agree it is wrong and I agree that a commonsense definition would say it is torture but legally it is not.
Obama has retained the right to order torture. He has given it up as much as Bush did since Bush did not do it since 2005.
Yes, waterboarding is highly aversive and makes one feel like they are drowning but it is not necessarily painful.
"Khalid Sheikh Mohammed needed only to be shown the drowning equipment again before he "broke". "Waterboarding works", the former officer said. "Drowning is a baseline fear. So is falling. People dream about it. It's human nature. Suffocation is a very scary thing. When you're waterboarded, you're inverted, so it exacerbates the fear. It's not painful, but it scares the **** out of you". This former officer had been waterboarded himself in a training course. "
http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:iQxP3TLgvzgJ:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterboarding+waterboarding+"not+painful"&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a
It is really really scary. But it is not painful and in YOUR definition of torture you said torture was painful. So waterboarding did not meet your definition. The legal definition says that to be torture something has to be painful for more than 20 seconds - coincidentally just how long each event of waterboarding happens.
Remember we waterboard many of our own soldiers in training.
We might as well have taken the terrorists and dropped them off of a short cliff with a bunge cord that we made them believe was broken. It would have been really scary but it would not have been painful and it would not have made them them think anything except that they were going to fall to a painful experience of broken bones (cause it was a short cliff). And like the innate fear of drowning people have an innate fear of falling.
In fact I remember being atop a tall building at Niagara falls and it had a glass floor that made it look like one was going to fall through. we could take terrorists up there and with some theatrics make them think they were going to be thrown through a hole in the floor. then we would actually pick them up and toss them onto the glass. That too would be really scary, might cause them to talk, but would cause no pain or no real threat of death. (it might be torture for other reasons but would not be torture based on it being painful)
