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We charged them with a crime for waterboarding U.S. soldiers. Are you saying it's not a problem if we do it? And it wasn't just the Japanese - I linked earlier to a legal analysis that demonstrates we've always considered waterboarding torture, and a crime, across more than a century, in various cases, from wars to domestically, done by U.S. soldiers or to them, etc. There was no question until 2002 or so whether it was torture - it was considered obviously torture, period.
Well, the premise of that statement is false. Waterboarding was known as "The Third Degree" in common parlance in the 1930s and 1940s (and the origin of the phrase "giving him the third degree"). It was only removed from fuse n domestic policing in the 1940s, but says nothing of its legal use in the military against saboteurs and non-uniformed combatants.
And the core issue remains - that killing is part of war does not speak AT ALL to whether or not torture is morally justifiable or acceptable. We've separated those issues for our entire history as far as I can tell, but you're lumping them into the same moral question. If torture is justifiable because it falls short of killing, then you've opened a very large barn door.
And no, we don't. In both cases the use has to be warranted. It is SOMETIMES warranted to kill a person in wartime but that doesn't mean it is warranted at all times to kill people in war time. Likewise the use of EIT is not warranted in all cases because it is war time, but that doesn't mean it is always unwarranted in wartime.
Also, the left is trying to use Japanese interrogation methods and the Japanese War crime Tribunals as evidence that the US saw waterboarding as a capital offense after WWII... but this is more abject stupidity. Nobody was hung for waterboarding. When a Japanese defendant was sentenced to be executed the sentence was for, in all case, atrocities they had committed during the war such as the Rape of Nanking. Some were given prison sentences for using waterboarding but that was because waterboarding was outlawed for use on POWs who qualified for GC protections.