WATERBOARDING IS TORTURE.

Bret Stephens performs the favorite conservative trick of defending the use of torture by defining methods of torture which he favors as "not torture":

"For the record, count me as one who does not object to the interrogation to which KSM was reportedly subjected, including waterboarding. This is not because I take the use of waterboarding lightly (although I have a hard time concluding that a technique, however terrifying, to which CIA officers are willing to subject themselves experimentally can properly be counted as torture). It's because I take the threat posed by KSM seriously."

Waterboarding is torture. It was devised by torturers as a method of torture. CIA officers subject themselves to this torture as part of their training to withstand torture. Bret Stephens supports torture.

"As with the militant anti-abortion movement, which believes that every abortion is murder and thus that every abortionist is a "murderer," the Times editorialists and their fellow travelers would characterize anyone who favors so much as touching a hair on 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's head as "pro-torture." This isn't argument. It's moral bullying."

This seems a lot less clever when you consider that the difference between people who believe that "every abortion is murder and thus that every abortion doctor is a 'murderer'" and people who "characterize anyone who favors so much as touching a hair on 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's head as 'pro-torture'" is that the former actually exist.

--Matthew Duss