I read the New York Times article, and where you see some kind of inbuilt Republican lust for torture, I see people who were dealing with a new and frightening situation, and who made some decisions that even now, are controversial. The interrogators said they got information from people like KSM that saved lives--they waterboarded a total of three people--but of course there is no way to tell if they would eventually gotten the same information by normal interrogation techniques. Whatever they are nowadays.

At the time, all of America was screaming for the government to DO SOMETHING to protect us. The interrogation techniques were eventually revealed to members of Congress in 2002, including Democrats, and were approved. You don't hear much about this.

This isn't a cut-and-dried issue. At the bottom of it all is a serious question I asked a long time ago:

How many deaths is it worth for America to keep its moral high ground? This is not a facetous question, and believe it or not, I think there may be a real answer greater than zero.

But I don't have that answer.

It's even more complicated because in this war we're not talking just about the deaths of military volunteers, but men, women and children who did not ask to be placed on the front lines of this war.

I wish I had a liberal's easy moral certainty on this: the belief that wars of this nature can be fought without hard treatment of prisoners, without bombing villages, without dealing with gray areas, and by always letting the other guy shoot first.

I'm actually conflicted on this, and have been for a long time, but when it comes down to it, I'd probably rather err in the direction of American lives and property.