Personally I don't think the law matters in those cases. I just doubt CIA interrogators or anyone else would care what the laws were if they were faced with these situations. Would they go "oh well, the torture laws say we can't touch this guy, so we might as well wait for him to give us the information...*whistle*"? If lives were in danger, I think they'd take any means necessary to protect US citizens. To me, the whole fallout over torture laws seems like a circus show. Does it really effect real interrogators on the ground? And if they did torture someone to extract information, would we really know anyway (or care if it saved thousands of lives)? I can't answer those questions.