A Matter of Perception

If it is a matter of perception whether torture is torture or is not torture, then perception is now rather similar to the view of the world that dreamed up the test witches were subjected to in Salem and environs in the 17th Century. If they survived the drowning, burning, or whatever other lethal method was used, it proved they were a witch and they had to be killed. If they died, well oops, the accusers were wrong. You can see such a graveyard in Boston, quite near Bunker Hill in fact.
Shame is what the playpen has brought to America while claiming to bring it security. Security has not been increased, but normal people are being spied on everywhere as one country after another follows the US lead and curtails human rights and freedom of speech (and I don't just mean China).
And the bad guys are aware that Americans torture and are no longer prepared to pull any punches! (And besides, is a suicide bomber afraid of water-boarding?)

- The New York Times
Notes Show Confusion on Interrogation Methods
By MARK MAZZETTI and SCOTT SHANE, Published: June 18, 2008
When military officers at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, struggled in the fall of 2002 to find ways to get terrorism suspects to talk, they turned to the one agency that had spent several months experimenting with the limits of physical and psychological pressure: the Central Intelligence Agency.
They took the top lawyer for the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorist Center to Guantánamo, where he explained that the definition of illegal torture was “written vaguely.”
“It is basically subject to perception,” said the lawyer, Jonathan M. Fredman, according to meeting minutes released Tuesday at a Senate hearing. “If the detainee dies, you’re doing it wrong.”

A rose is a rose is a rose, and torture by any other name smells just as rotten.