No easy answer?

Apparently, according to George Dubya's memoirs, the use of "waterboarding" on prisoners in the US prevented, among other things, attacks in this country.  So does that make it right to use such techniques?  He certainly thinks so - as he saw it, and presumably still sees it - his job was to protect America, and to that end, anything goes.  So what do we think?  Let's get one thing out of the way from the start - waterboarding is torture.  Whatever his legal advisers may have said, putting someone in immediate fear of an unpleasant death is torture by any civilised standards.  So we then come down to the age-old dilemma of - do the ends justify the means?  If doing something bad produces a good result, does that justify doing the bad thing?  Even more so, does it justify continuing to do the bad thing in the hope of producing more good results?  Philosophers have argued about this for centuries, and I don't claim to have the answer.  I do think however that it pays to concentrate more on whether the "good" thing really was all good, rather than looking at the bad thing which is obviously bad.  So as a result of torturing these individuals, potential attacks may have been prevented, but equally it may have resulted in many more people becoming "radicalised" and as such a future threat to this country.  So is it really such a "good" result?  It's a bit like the "does prison work" argument, isn't it?  Short-term pluses versus long-term minuses.  At the end of the day it's a moral argument and we must all make up our own mind - or stick our heads in the sand and hope it goes away.