There is a principled human-rights position on all this. You can say: "No one wants to see bad things happen to people, but I honestly believe abusive tactics are so corrosive of our society's principles that it would be better for 10,000 Americans to be killed in a terrorist attack than for us to prevent the attack by subjecting a morally culpable terrorist to non-lethal forms of coercion that cause no lasting physical or mental harm."
That would be the honest argument, but it is not going to persuade many people. Thus the continued pretense, against all evidence and logic, that the tactics don't work.
The "the tactics don't work" bit aside, the point, as I've said many times on this blog, is that I AM one of the people who believes that using "abusive tactics are so corrosive of our society's principles" are not worth the price of, say, 10,000 Americans being killed in a terrorist attack. Yeah it's tragic that people will have to lose their lives for us to keep our moral compass, just as they have in several wars over the last few centuries, but surely this is a price for the very freedom everybody loves to go on and on about that we're willing to pay, no?
Everything, including an issue like this, is opportunity cost: losing people while keeping our most important principles is a price we should be willing to pay, just like the 50,000 people killed in car accidents a year is a price we're all willing to pay to be able to get in a metal box and hurtle down a road surrounded by other cars at 75mph because we want to get where we gotta get to. Not a perfect analogy, but one of opportunity cost anyway. (I'm lying...it's perfect.)
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