On the one hand, waterboarding is torture. On the other hand....

I'm sorry -- there is no other hand. Waterboarding is torture, period. It's been that way for decades
-- it was torture when we went after Japanese war criminals who used the ancient and inhumane
interrogation tactic, it was torture when Pol Pot and some of the worst dictators known to mankind
used it against their own people, and it was torture to the U.S. military which once punished soldiers
who adopted the grim practice. 

And waterboarding was described as "torture," almost without fail, in America's newspapers.

Until 2004, after the arrival of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and their criminal notions of
"enhanced interrogations." For four years -- in what would have to be the bizarro-world version
of "speaking truth to power," waterboarding was almost never torture on U.S. newsprint.
Then waterboarding-as-torture nearly made a mild comeback in journo-world, until perpetrators
like Cheney and Inquirer op-ed columnist John Yoo began the big pushback, when American
newspapers bravely turned their tails and fled.

The sordid history is spelled out in a significant new report by the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard..."