Put it this way:

If I had to choose between having my eyes gouged out and being waterboarded:
I’d choose waterboarding.

If I had to choose between having my hand crushed in a vise and being waterboarded:
I’d choose waterboarding.

If I had to choose between being fed into a plastic shredding machine and being waterboarded:
I’d choose waterboarding.

If I had to choose between being electrocuted and being waterboarded:
I’d choose waterboarding.

If I had to choose between just about ANY actual physical torture that causes ACTUAL physical harm and being waterboarded:
I’d choose waterboarding.

No one claims that waterboarding is a pleasant experience. That’s the whole point: It makes you feel like you’re about to drown. But the key is: You aren’t actually drowning. Because as soon as you sit up, you’re fine.

Mancow proved this himself by sitting up and within just a few seconds giving an interview to say how horrible it was. But they very fact that he was giving an interview and being uninjured proves that there is a distinction between waterboarding and “traditional” torture.

Think of it in these terms. Mancow said:

“It is way worse than I thought it would be, and that’s no joke,”Mancow said, likening it to a time when he nearly drowned as a child. “It is such an odd feeling to have water poured down your nose with your head back…It was instantaneous…and I don’t want to say this: absolutely torture. I wanted to prove it wasn’t torture,” Mancow said. “They cut off our heads, we put water on their face…I got voted to do this but I really thought ‘I’m going to laugh this off.’ ”

But when it was all over, Mancow was physically fine, but Nick Berg’s head had been cut off.

That’s the difference.

Perhaps we need to come up with a different and more “nuanced” series of definitions for “torture”; waterboarding may indeed be “physchological torture” (as are many other things), but Mancow’s physical health immediately afterwards proves it isn’t physical torture — which is the traditional definition of torture.