I was just reading Andrew Sullivan whine about the use of torture. He thinks that dunking someone in cold water to lower their body temperature during an interrogation is horrible horrible torture and used the fact that the Nazi's used to do it in their medical experiments to show how evil Americans are.

One, dunking someone in water over and over again may cross the line to torture, but it's ahrdly the same as cutting off fingers or making someone watch their daughter be raped or whatever. Two, the Nazi's did it for fun as part of inhumane experiments, in this case to see how low you can get someone's temperature before they die. If motive is important, and previous discussions on crime ahve shown that people think it is, then there is a HUGE gap between deadly experiments on the human body, and non-injury related interrogations techniques used to extract information to save lives.