INDY500 said:
Would the order to do that, shoot down a commercial airliner (murder those civilians) to stop an attack on the Capitol or White House, been justified?
I think so and that's my point. What's a handful of waterboard cases against blowing an American jet out of the sky on the moral outrage scale? Or launching a missile at a suspected terror house in Iraq knowing innocent people could be killed or injured. Or killing 200,000 Japanese to save many times more lives?
you're doing the STING thing -- thinking all things are the same.
blowing a hijacked airliner out of the sky when it is known that it is heading for a civilian target is quite different from the President deliberately increasing his own power to expand the rules of what is and what isn't an acceptable method of interrogation. this is a policy, it is an actual program of interrogation, and it is applicable in more than just worst-case scenarios.
as John McCain has said, "Life is not "24"." it's not. there isn't going to be an airplane of civilians heading towards a tower and if we only had the power to waterboard someone, then we could somehow avert the airplane. there isn't going to be a ticking bomb in a building and we'll only find out where it is before it goes off if we waterboard someone.
life doesn't work this way. these are not the situations we ever face. and you're still ignoring the fact that torture does not work. people will say anything to get you to stop torturing them. so what happens? you spend countless resources checking out tips that you *wanted* to be true, rather than the ones that were true.
haven't we learned the lesson from Iraq? you get bad intelligence precisely when you try to make your information-gathering fit a prescribed course of action. intelligence is not supposed to support a policy, policy is supposed to be designed around intelligence. when you torture, you get the information you've already decided you want to get because the man will tell you what you want to hear in order to get you to stop.
so what happens? you get the Soviet Union. the good people leave, and the sadists take over, and false confessions are deliberately extracted.