In an interview with NBC on Sunday, CIA Director John Brennan said the agency will not use waterboarding or other so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques,” which are widely regarded as torture, even if ordered to do so by the country’s next president.

Brennan had only been CIA director a short time when the Senate Intelligence Committee issued its 2014 report condemning enhanced interrogation techniques as ineffective. Responding to that same report, Brennan defended the CIA’s effectiveness while essentially admitting waterboarding and other techniques resulted in dubious intelligence.

All of which makes Brennan’s current position even more interesting. Sunday, he said he will refuse any order to use enhanced interrogation techniques, even if that order comes directly from the president. This sounds like a firm moral stance and we might be tempted to applaud Brennan. Unless, that is, we take into account that the man is the head of an organization based on secrecy and subterfuge. Still, there is every reason to believe Brennan views this issue as an existential threat when he says on national television that:

‘I will not agree to carry out some of these tactics and techniques I’ve heard bandied about because this institution needs to endure.’

Brennan seems to recognize at least the ramifications of torture, so why is it so hard for everyone else to see these, too? And we should be clear about what is at stake here. No one is arguing that these methods are effective. What they seem to be saying is that torture makes for good revenge. And whether or not it is used on innocent people, well that is another story.

The main issue in this debate, as always, comes down to waterboarding, something presidential candidate Donald Trump comfortably refers to as torture but says the United States needs to use anyway. His argument on this does not come from getting better intelligence, saving lives, or anything quite so noble. Instead he seems to be calling for nothing more than fighting fire with fire. If the United States wants to defeat ISIS, we had better use tactics as brutal as their own. In March, Trump told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that:

‘Look, I think we have to change our law on the waterboarding thing, where they can chop off heads and drown people in cages, in heavy steel cages and we can’t waterboard. We have to change our laws and we have to be able to fight at least on almost equal basis. We have laws that we have to obey in terms of torture. They have no laws whatsoever that they have to obey.’

It seems we have come a long way since CIA interrogator John Kiriakou blew the whistle on torture and enhanced interrogation techniques in a 2007 interview with ABC. It is worth noting that so far, Kiriakou is the only person convicted of any crime related to the use torture in the aftermath of 9/11. And it was his revelation that sparked a national debate over this approach to interrogation, a debate rightfully accompanied by moral outrage. At the time, Americans wanted to know: “Is this really who we are?” The answer came up a resounding ‘no’ then, yet now the question seems to be back on the table. Trump calls it torture and fully supports it. Ted Cruz calls it enhanced interrogation, but he, too, supports its use. So we find ourselves having to ask once again, is this really who we are?

Featured Image by Gage Skidmore via Flickr, available under a Creative Commons license.