A Thought Experiment: You walk into your home to find an armed intruder threatening to shoot your spouse and children, trapped with nowhere to run. Fortunately, you have a gun.

You try to negotiate, but the intruder is in no mood to talk. His intention is murder.

You have seconds to decide. What do you do?

For many, the answer is clear. You fight to save your family. And most of us would call that self defense. Most Christians would agree that any action would be not only morally permissible, but also morally required.

Now imagine another scenario: You are a CIA interrogator facing an avowed terrorist who was caught in the act of preparing for murder. You know he has information about a plot to blow up an unidentified building in a large American city. Innocent lives hang in the balance.

For hours you have attempted to extract the life-saving information from him, but to no avail. The last option is one you believe will work: water-boarding, but you have only a few minutes to decide. What do you do?

Again, for most of us, the answer is clear. You do what you have to do to save those innocent lives, which in this case means water-boarding the terrorist. You are saving other people's families.

In the continuing debate over the morality of enhanced interrogation, an essential consideration is often overlooked: intent. For Christians, intent is integral to determining whether and when certain techniques, including water-boarding, are morally permissible.

Historically, various forms of harsh interrogation have been employed as a means to punish, humiliate, intimidate, exact revenge or force a confession. Consider Cuba, where for half a century torture has been used to punish, humiliate and intimidate those who speak out against the ruling Marxist regime and for democratic values and basic human rights.

In an interview for this piece, Cuban Eleno Oviedo recalled the torture he experienced as a political prisoner of 26 years in Castro's prisons. "I was stripped in a cell and left in solitary confinement for the first 126 days," he said about the time after his initial abduction. The regime's intention, Oviedo said, was to get him to confess to being a CIA agent. Oviedo, who now lives in the United States, said that other political prisoners were left naked for weeks at a time. Some prisoners' fingers were cut or had their fingernails torn off. Others received beatings so severe that they died. And "three-hundred times I heard prisoners being executed" by firing squad, Oviedo recalled. And the torture continues. The horrors of Castro's gulag make us recoil in disgust, and their intentions and methods of torture should be rejected by a just society.

However, the issue which has been ignored to date in the discussion of enhanced interrogation is whether there is a difference between inflicting pain for its own sake or using some harsher methods with deliberation when lives are on the line. When the intent is to extract information necessary to save human beings in imminent danger, harsh treatment may be justified and, I believe, sometimes necessary. Continued...