Former New York City mayor and current Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani does not view waterboarding and sleep deprivation as torture. See "In His Words: Giuliani on Torture" http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/25/in-his-own-words-giuliani-on-torture/ for the sorry spectacle.
Only former prisoner of war in Communist North Vietnam Senator John McCain and libertarian constitutionalist Representative Ron Paul MD have taken strong positions against torture amongst the Republican presidential aspirants. Former governor Romney wants to expand the Guantanamo prison.
What happened to the rule of law? What happened to the Constitution? What a disgrace!
Some years ago, I reviewed a historical and sociological account of torture that put it into perspective (Torture by Edward Peters?)
One point he made is that torture in the modern world was usually not a accident but a studied policy that was linked to the worldviews of the advocates of torture within regimes.
Some months ago, if I recall correctly, the NY Times reported that the methods now being employed by the Bush administration within the CIA and Defense Department were copied from Soviet models.
In the aftermath of the Spanish-American war, the pioneering Social Darwinist sociologist at Yale University William Graham Sumner wrote a controversial essay, "The Conquest of the United States By Spain" which argued that if the United States emulated Spain’s policies of imperialism and aggressive war that it would emulate Imperial Spain in other ways. The yahoos of his time demanded that he be fired from his position at Yale. Our base at Guantanamo is a legacy of that forgotten war.
Sumner wrote also of the forgotten man who pays for the schemes dreamed up of others.
Let us learn from the past and ask ourselves what kind of world and America do we want to live in and bequeath to the next generation. Shall we embrace statism or libertarianism? Shall we embrace the rule of men or the rule of law through the constitution?