The Tea Party Platform defines interrogation techniques as follows:

Torture:

A sadistic method that is demonstrated by disfigurement of the body, extreme painful methods that include dislocation or breakage of bones, stretching of limbs, cutting of skin, the painful pulling of nails, genitals, teeth, tongue or other body parts 

Torture would include beatings, the use of whips, ropes, fire, electricity, canes, gas, chemicals, switches, clubs or other methods that will cause physical harm to the body, the organs, the skin, or leave permanent scarring on the body 

The intentional infliction of pain for the purpose of permanently maiming, scarring, burning, disfiguring or disabling normal body functions 

Methods that when taken to an extreme would with malice include the death of the individual 

Aggressive Interrogation Techniques:

Threatening but not producing direct physical harm. 

The use of an individual's fear or phobias

The use of environmental stimuli to make the individual extremely cold or warm, to make it constantly dark or light, fluctuating bright lights, to cause sleep deprivation or to produce other discomfort that will not produce permanent harm to the individual 

The use of water techniques that produce no harm but provide the sensation of drowning  

The use of nuisances or irritating stimuli to produce a willingness to talk in order to eliminate the irritation or negative stimulus 

Base Interrogation Techniques:

Question and Answer techniques

Debriefing

Interviews

Asking questions on a basis that would be considered entirely voluntary on the part of the captured enemy

Argument

It would be entirely improper to in any way compare a nuisance or a temporary discomfort that produces no permanent harm to a tactic that produces physical scarring, disfigurement, extreme pain or even death.  Yet the argument that continues to be presented by those opposing aggressive interrogation techniques such as water boarding state that such a tactic is torture.  Those that support the method say it is not.  We obviously do not share the same definition.   

If persons regard water boarding as torture they must tell us how that process compares to the first definition and provide us a name / term and define that name / term in a manner that will draw a distinction between methods that are intended to produce cooperation through psychological threat, nuisance and minor physical discomfort and those methods that when delivered with malice are clearly sadistic and will produce death. 

The Tea Party supports the use of Aggressive Interrogation Techniques.  We base our support on the information that has been provided to us by intelligence officers, including George Tenet who indicate that it was through water boarding that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed provided the CIA useful information that resulted in the saving of countless American lives. 

The argument is too often given that information that is provided as a result of aggressive techniques will be unreliable.  Yet those who argue this point never seem to consider that an individual who lies to interrogators during a water boarding method will have nothing to look forward to except additional water boarding if the information he provides is unverifiable, inaccurate or obviously intended to mislead our military. 

The bottom line is that we are at war with a group that is difficult to identify and nearly impossible to find.  If aggressive interrogation techniques will save American lives then it would be derelict for our military or civilian intelligence personnel to not have this tool at their disposal.    

We in the Tea Party Movement oppose torture yet who would blame an interrogator who used torture to gain information that saved an American city from annihilation?