re: #17 Charles

Waterboarding is the only one of the “harsh interrogation techniques” used on terror suspects that I think you can make a real case to say it’s torture.

The problem here, and the reason there’s so much argument on this and other threads, is simple: there isn’t any definition of what constitutes torture.

And worse, politicians want to keep it that way. It’s easier for them if they can always deny that some particular technique is torture, or to claim that some particular technique is, depending on the point they’re hoping to make.

If Congress were serious about ensuring that the US doesn’t torture people, they would be working day and night to come up with a useful definition. That would end all debate instantly - once there’s a definition, you can quibble over the definition itself, but meanwhile it allows you to categorize whatever technique is in question unambiguously as torture or not. Congress should be ashamed of itself for turning this very serious topic into a political football instead of knuckling down and doing it’s job, which is to make the law that would state once and for all what is forbidden and what is permitted.

Even twisted liars like Pelosi, confronted with the fact that she was fully briefed on specific interrogation techniques and their use, can always claim, “Well, it didn’t sound like torture to me, they way they presented it.” She’ll be off the hook thanks to Congress’ lack of diligence on this issue, and both she and the rest of the Congress knows it, and wants to keep it that way. The lack of a simple, clear definition of what constitutes torture is a loophole big enough to drive a whole caravan of Congressional SUVs through.