In a fascinating piece, Christpher Hitchens lets himself be waterboarded and comes to the conclusion:

if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.

But as part of his piece, he provides a very good summation of the argument for waterboarding; or at least the view of those who would dismiss the idea of any “moral equivalence” between what we might do, and what Islamists do:

The team who agreed to give me a hard time in the woods of North Carolina belong to a highly honorable group. This group regards itself as out on the front line in defense of a society that is too spoiled and too ungrateful to appreciate those solid, underpaid volunteers who guard us while we sleep. These heroes stay on the ramparts at all hours and in all weather, and if they make a mistake they may be arraigned in order to scratch some domestic political itch. Faced with appalling enemies who make horror videos of torture and beheadings, they feel that they are the ones who confront denunciation in our press, and possible prosecution. As they have just tried to demonstrate to me, a man who has been waterboarded may well emerge from the experience a bit shaky, but he is in a mood to surrender the relevant information and is unmarked and undamaged and indeed ready for another bout in quite a short time. When contrasted to actual torture, waterboarding is more like foreplay. No thumbscrew, no pincers, no electrodes, no rack. Can one say this of those who have been captured by the tormentors and murderers of (say) Daniel Pearl? On this analysis, any call to indict the United States for torture is therefore a lame and diseased attempt to arrive at a moral equivalence between those who defend civilization and those who exploit its freedoms to hollow it out, and ultimately to bring it down. I myself do not trust anybody who does not clearly understand this viewpoint.

Understood, but while this may be the view of some who know all about waterboarding up close and personal, within the general population those who support it have another reason to do so: As the terrorists might use these methods on us, we are justified in using these methods - and far worse - on them.

Because failure to do so marks this society as weak; we must be every bit as vicious as our enemies, for if we aren’t, they’ll overwhelm us. And that sentiment has nothing to do with freedom, nothing to do with human rights, nothing to do with the ideas of liberal democracy; it’s a tribalistic kill-or-be-killed instinct.

At the same time, Hitchens includes the contrasting view of counter-terrorism expert Malcolm Nance, whose argues:

1. Waterboarding is a deliberate torture technique and has been prosecuted as such by our judicial arm when perpetrated by others.

2. If we allow it and justify it, we cannot complain if it is employed in the future by other regimes on captive U.S. citizens. It is a method of putting American prisoners in harm’s way.

3. It may be a means of extracting information, but it is also a means of extracting junk information. (Mr. Nance told me that he had heard of someone’s being compelled to confess that he was a hermaphrodite. I later had an awful twinge while wondering if I myself could have been “dunked” this far.) To put it briefly, even the C.I.A. sources for the Washington Post story on waterboarding conceded that the information they got out of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was “not all of it reliable.” Just put a pencil line under that last phrase, or commit it to memory.

4. It opens a door that cannot be closed. Once you have posed the notorious “ticking bomb” question, and once you assume that you are in the right, what will you not do? Waterboarding not getting results fast enough? The terrorist’s clock still ticking? Well, then, bring on the thumbscrews and the pincers and the electrodes and the rack.

But as noted - some Americans would gladly employ the thumbscrews and the pincers and the electrodes and the rack. Because for those folks, in the long run torture is less about extracting information than it is about inflicting punishment. And that, really, is how you turn into the very thing you’re supposed to be fighting.