Things that happen daily in US jails and prisons thru out america today would be considered torture by any reasonable person yet it appears to be perfectly acceptable to the general public.

Leaving aside the question of whether inmate-on-inmate crimes that are widely suspected and maybe poorly policed are morally equivalent to state sanctioned violations of the Constitution and the Geneva Conventions ... are you suggesting that because there is no widespread outrage over prison activities that there shouldn't be any outrage over torture by the military or the intelligence community?

But you'll just say your point was about the definition of torture. Let's see, we could go with the definition we used for torture when we executed people for doing it to our soldiers. No, can't do that, because that's what we've been doing to people.

Okay, let's go with what the Geneva Conventions ... oops, no, "any reasonable person" would say we've done that. How about "cruel and unusual"? Damn, yup, definitely doing that.

Well, forget definitions. How about we say that anyone who is proud of what they did, and confident that it was legal and necessary, will obviously stand up and defend why they did it? If someone is afraid to say what they did it makes it look like they knew it was wrong. Well damn, it looks like they fail on that count, too.

The point here (Remember, we're talking about Rand's question whether the people who did the torture are in the clear because someone told them it was legal) is that there are lots of things that I wouldn't do, even if someone told me they were legal. Because I know that those things are wrong.

Torture isn't wrong because it's illegal. It's illegal because it's wrong.