A Response Concerning Waterboarding

This article is in response to the post entitled "The A.C.L.U., a/k/a the US Department of Treason!".  In this post, a quote said in part,

Bush did the patriotic thing.  He ordered Mohammad waterboarded and he quickly gave up information that stopped at least two terrorist attacks that would have killed thousand [sic] of Americans.

 I must respectfully disagree.  As the above video shows, Erich "Mancow" Muller, a conservative radio talkshow host admitted that waterboarding is torture after having gone through it himself.  He had volunteered to be waterboarded intending to prove that it was NOT in fact torture.  You can watch the entire thing here.

The 8th Amendment says,

Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

Any intellectually honest person should be able to see that "cruel and unusual punishment" is the same thing as torture.  There is nothing in this amendment or anything else in the Constitution which limits the scope of this prohibition on torture.  (It goes without saying that the Bill of Rights was originally intended to apply the Federal government only.)  There is a reason why the Framers of the Bill of Rights chose to add this to our Constitution.  The reason is that the People demanded it!

And I don't believe for a minute that any valuable information was actually obtained from these waterboarding incidents.  I don't generally believe claims made by our government and our Founding Fathers taught us to be suspicious of any government.  The information supposedly obtained from this torture could already have been known or the whole thing could have been a hoax.  Governments naturally tend to want to expand their powers beyond Constitutional constraints in order have more leverage over the People, to prevent us from being truly free.  Whatever happened to relying on God for our protection?  Even if valuable information was obtained from this torture, do you really want to cast aside the Constitution so easily, and thus set a precedent for future constitutional violations, ones which next time could be perpetrated against YOU?