Friedersdorf counters Jonah Goldberg:
Among the many problems with the ticking time bomb scenario is the fact that it is basically about what an individual should do in an awful circumstance, not what legal regime a country should adopt when weighing the treatment of prisoners. The United States not only should prohibit torture in the handling of detainees, it already has done so. Today’s torture advocates think that the law should state otherwise, but are unwilling to admit as much, so they construct Orwellian descriptions like “enhanced interrogation techniques” to describe water-boarding. The semantic debate about torture is their creation, and at bottom, it matters because if it’s proved that water-boarding is torture, they’ll have been proved to have broken the law.
I just believe that every neocon who says that waterboarding isn't torture should personally go to Cambodia and demand that the waterboard be removed from the torture museum. And every neocon should have the intellectual fortitude to point out that, by their definition, John McCain was never tortured in Vietnam. Just "aggressively questioned" to use Reuel Marc Gerecht's latest absurd and frankly disgusting euphemism.
The Dish 