Today's Wiki of the Week is going to be a little challenging because it is long. Any "wall of text" or "TL;DR" types can just skip it now, it will only cause you angst; here's your consolation prize, now get out. For the rest of you, I know we're all busy these days doing important things like watching TV, playing computer games, and driving to bars for a drink, so I'll try to give you incentive to actually click through. Here it is: political discord, your free pass to hate.

I don't care what side you think you're on politically, I don't care if you use your directional signal during rush hour, but I do hope that after reading some of this we can join together and just say one thing as civilized human beings - Torture is bad.

Follow up:

Leon Panetta, the Director of the CIA, issued a letter to his staff in April 2009 which stated in part:

• Under the Executive Order, the CIA does not employ any of the enhanced interrogation techniques that were authorized by the Department of Justice from 2002 to 2009.
• No CIA contractors will conduct interrogations.
• CIA no longer operates detention facilities or black sites and has proposed a plan to decommission the remaining sites.

Contract interrogations? "Black Sites"? Executive Orders?

Well, Leon is referring to Barack Obama's order to stop using waterboarding and other interrogation techniques, to close secret interrogation facilities, and to cease paying contractors to perform these interrogations of "unlawful enemy combatants". I don't want to focus on the politics of this, because it isn't my intent or point. I knew we were running a facility at Guantanamo to hold and interrogate suspected terrorists. I didn't know we were running a myriad of secret facilities - Black Sites, with more detainees. I didn't know what waterboarding was until recently either. We must have a lot of enemies.

War isn't what it used to be. Time was, you pointed your rifle across the field and pulled the trigger at the heathens coming at you. The people in your trench were your friends and the people coming out of the opposing trench were bad people that needed to be killed. Ah, the good 'ole days! Now we have secret groups of secretive people secretively plotting to do really unpleasant things to, well, just about anyone else that isn't them. We're all in agreement that these people are bad people. The tough part is figuring out who they are and stopping them before they do bad things. Our justice systems aren't designed to handle putting people in prison for thinking about doing bad things, so something has to change. Maybe we need places to detain people and ask them questions. Maybe we need ways to imprison people who will do bad things if we give them the freedom to act. There are a lot of hard questions here with difficult answers and I will tell you up front I'm not qualified to judge what is right and what is wrong in preemptive law enforcement.

What I am qualified to judge is how a civilized human being should act. We all are, because we are members of the human race, and we are members of modern civilization. I suspect that as members of this meta group, we unfortunately fall into two general categories regarding how we perceive life and our passage through it:

1) The ends justify the means.
2) The course to an end should be carried out within the constraints of one's ethics and morality.

Is torture bad? No one would choose torture for themselves. Apparently few people wish to be agents of torture either as shown by the CIA contracting out "advanced interrogation". I've never been waterboarded, but the practice has been going on for a very long time. Beginning in 1478, the Spanish Inquisition used a method of torture called toca, also called tortura del agua, consisted of introducing a cloth into the mouth of the victim, and forcing them to ingest water spilled from a jar so that they had the impression of drowning. This is waterboarding. Do you wonder if tortured people will say whatever those torturing them want to hear just to make it stop?

Of course the Spanish Inquisition was mainly concerned with routing out Christians who practiced forms of Christianity other than Catholicism, because these were heretics, or accused of being heretics, and had to be stopped. Now our enemies are terrorists, or people accused of being terrorists, and they must be stopped.

Do the ends of stopping heresy, or stopping terrorism justify the means of torture? Regardless of what bad behavior we're trying to stop, is it right to torture people into confessing their purported wrong doings? Do you really want to be a member of a modern civilization that puts on the "I heart Waterboarding" T-shirt and tortures people that might be thinking wrong thoughts? If we're so proud of torturing people, why were we doing it behind closed doors and in secret facilities?

If you believe that the ends justify the means, do you also believe it is justified to torture people who may not be guilty just to find some who may be? Is that how a free society conducts a proper witch hunt? If you believe that the means to an end should follow one's ethical and moral codes, how can you justify torture even if the heretic is guilty? I believe that whichever consequentialist category you fall into you still should, after careful consideration, believe that torture shouldn't be a valid means.

As Americans, one of our favorite past times is decrying the moral injustices around the world from the Stasi, the KGB, or the Chinese shooting people down in Tiananmen Square. Doesn't it seem disingenuous to imply a higher moral ground if there in fact isn't one?

So, long winded as that was for an intro, I do think that today's Wiki of the Week is worth the read and worth thinking about. It is none other than - *queue the ominous music* -

The Spanish Inquisition!

Additional reading, should you choose it:

Leon Panetta's Letter to the CIA
CIA Black Sites

And if you didn't believe me that you can buy "I heart Waterboarding" T-shirts, here you go:http://shop.cafepress.com/design/24706126