Why waterboarding is wrong...

It amazes me to have to write this, but a lot of conservative types out there don't understand why we shouldn't be torturing people. Here's my rundown, and since I tend to use torture and waterboarding interchangably, I'll explain now. It's my view that any form of "coersion" which causes people to prefer being dead is probably torturous.

OK, I'll try to keep this simple. Torture is bad because:

1. It's sadistic and cruel. It's a crime against humanity and God.
2. It's a bad strategic decision in our ideological war on terror. Each person in this world can chose to align with us, with terror, or with neither. When we run around waterboarding people, it doesn't really endear us to the world. The way to win an ideological war is to have a better ideology.
3. It's a bad strategic decision militarily. A lot of people bring up the issue that if we waterboard others then it's likely our POWs will be waterboarded. I don't want to diminish that argument, but mostly the people who advocate torture aren't worried about ever becoming POWs. So let me put it this way. Torturing captives makes people less likely to surrender. Instead, we should be doing everything possible to encourage our enemies to surrender. WWII would have been a lot harder if Italy had stood it's ground and not turned on the Germans. In the first days of the Iraq war, the Iraqi army was surrendering in droves. Those are strategic victories that we won because our enemy would rather surrender than fight. On the other hand, if our emenies come to expect four years of secret detention and torture, maybe next time they'll fight to the death. That's a strategic loss.

I'll note in passing that many have argued torture is ineffective. I don't care for that argument myself(because my gut response to something not working is to figure out how to do it better), so I'm not going to advance it. Another passing note is it's bad to allow the government that kind of power, but the libertarian argument can be shelved for another day.

There are so many good reasons to oppose torture/waterboarding/etc, and yet so many still support it. Who would have thought Americans wanted so badly to torture people?

PS: The repeated claims that "the US doesn't torture" despite evidence to the contrary don't help our global stature.