I’m starting to notice a trend among far right bloggers. Instead of insisting that particular interrogation techniques like waterboarding are not torture, and that what the rest of the world calls torture is not torture at all but simply “aggressive interrogation,” bloggers on the right are starting to acknowledge — sometimes tacitly, sometimes outright — that torture is torture.Leaving aside the prejudicial tautology at the end (it scalds the sensibilities considerably less if read as "that waterboarding is torture"), I find it quite plausible that "far right bloggers" (and their ilk!) would refer to waterboarding as torture more often now than previously.
Kathy doesn't venture an opinion regarding the explanation for the shift. But I think I can provide one. Congress passed legislation that pretty much defines waterboarding as torture whereas there was no similarly clear reason to classify it as such beforehand. John Yoo's original memo regarding the legal ramifications of enhanced interrogation techniques, as they were apparently known at the time he wrote, provided a pretty good explanation as to why. So bloggers were quite reasonable to leave the classification ambiguous. For one thing, as I have pointed out in my posts on waterboarding, most of us do not really have an accurate description of the technique or techniques.
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I posted a comment out in Left Field asking Kathy why she thinks waterboarding is torture. Perhaps some reasonable debate will ensue.
Kathy, have you gotten around to writing why you think waterboarding is torture? I’d like to hear the specific rationale you would use.