Torture

Lifted from John Schwenkler (via Sullivan):

Pretty stupid, apparently. I’m sure that this line of “thought” has been picked apart plenty of times in the anti-torture blogosphere, but Newt deserves a fisking of his own:

… waterboarding is not torture. Waterboarding has been routinely used to train American pilots in the military to understand what interrogation techniques they might encounter.

By extension:

• Having sex with a woman is not raping her. Sex is routinely had between men and women as an expression of love and a means to pleasure and procreation.
• Punching a man in the face is not assaulting him. Men routinely punch one another in the face in the boxing ring as a test of athletic prowess.
• Driving 75 miles an hour on a residential street is not speeding. Cars routinely drive 75 miles an hour or more on the highway.