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The fact that it may be occasionally justifiable does not thereby transform torture into a moral, ethical or civilised thing to do.
I personally would never suggest torture is a moral, ethical, or civilized thing to do based on my own moral, ethical, and societal views. The REASONS one is doing torture? Sure, those could be. But not the act itself.
However...just as I do not believe someone who has lied once is correct to be classified as a liar, I don't feel that someone who has performed an immoral act is automatically worthy of being classified as immoral. Just as I said with Liars, I'd dare anyone to show me someone who has never once in their life performed an immoral act of some fashion.
However to defend the use of such tactics however, one does have to inhabit that world of grey and leave behind that trippy, dippy realm of moral absolutism that says that what our side does is, by definition, morally incomparable and incontestably superior with what the enemy does. We are white, the enemy is black. That Bush-like moral infantilism doesn't work any more. In this world of grey relativism we can stare our enemies right in the eye because we are in the same moral no man's land.
Except you are using this strange hybrid of absolutism and relativism, where you seem to have disdain, disgust, and an attacking attitude towards one particular side because you believe subjectively that they should be held to a higher or different standard (or maybe you just sympathize less with them so you're more prone to attack them) while at the same time are using an absolutist mindset to come to your conclussion by taking a ridiculous small comparable sample size and using it to justify suggesting a equal relationship.