I know that we're in an ends justifies the means situation now, where we have to follow through with our corrupt and ridiculous plans that were already initiated. That's kind of how the government gets way with continuing to do the same old crap. "Well, we started it, now we might as well finish it." But the argument for non-state actors works both ways. We can't invade every country on earth to suss out anyone who opposes us, and terrorism is never ending. ISIS has shown us that even after our protracted theater in the Middle East, our enemies can still rebound and pose a serious threat to us. Yes perhaps Obama withdrew the troops to early, but really, the Middle East has a history of resiliency against its enemies. No war will be lengthy enough to really quell the cultural dissent, and the amount of damage we have done to their civilizations will ensure that they hate us for the foreseeable future. This is a battle that we CANNOT win, and I'm not saying that because I'm anti-war, but because I'm a pragmatist. We are bankrupting our nation trying to take water out of the ocean.
The point I'm trying to make is that there is the letter of the law, and then there is the spirit of the law. It's not like the tortures are in the spirit of the law, even though we can defend it using the precise wording of the treaty system.The human touch in our system of governance is lost when everything gets boiled down to pure semantics. But I guess that's what happens when government is made up of mostly lawyers and business people.