Obama's 170 degrees (going on 180) on Torture is a sad and scary spectacle

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112. No. there's never an excuse for torture.

Its shameful and degrading to our national identity. It's morally wrong, unnecessary and ineffective as an intelligence tool, and I would argue, clearly illegal.

The Obama administration ended the use of "enhanced interrogation" methods, or torture, in 2009 for these very reasons.

Mr. Koh argued that both treaties protected prisoners in American custody or control anywhere. In a 90-page memo he signed in 2013, before leaving the State Department to return to teaching at Yale Law School, he declared, “In my legal opinion, it is not legally available to policy makers to claim” that the torture treaty has no application abroad.

In March, the Obama administration rejected Mr. Koh’s view about the Bill of Rights-style accord, telling the United Nations that the United States still believed that it applied only on domestic soil. That treaty, however, raised more complications than the torture treaty does.

I'd go with Mr. Koh -- without having read his 90 page legal memo, or studied the senate ratification resolution with it's amendments and restrictions, or having heard a full account of the administration's position.

I suppose we'll see. Obama is mightily conservative on national security issues.