In my hypotheticals about waterboarding, I have repeatedly said that my questions are philosophical and moral in nature, and not legal. Despite my repeated statements, many bloggers and commenters think I am opining on a legal question. There is no reading comprehension exam required to blog or comment on the Internet, and I can’t respond to every sub-moron out there. But I thought I’d take a moment to re-emphasize the point.

The debate I am having about waterboarding is not a legal debate. It assumes the legality of waterboarding — which is certainly a counterfactual assumption in the criminal law context, and may well be so in the terror context as well.

Legally, any form of coercive interrogation renders a confession involuntary and unusable in court. So in considering this question, we face not only the reliability issue — which I have repeatedly said is a legitimate issue — but we also face the fact that coercive interrogations pose substantial obstacles to criminal prosecutions.

That is a very, very good reason not to do them in the real world.

I will probably link this post in my future posts on the topic.