The following insight could only come from one blogger:

. . . I find the focus on waterboarding to be off-base. Yes, it is torture, even if the New York Times cannot bring itself to say so. It is also a form of rape – using drowning rather than sexual penetration as the chosen form of mastery.

The course of action is obvious; is it not? John Yoo, Jay Bybee, and Steven Bradbury must register as sexual predators. (And we may want to keep an eye on that frisky water, too).

The longer this “debate” drags on the more preposterous the anti-WB side sounds. And, not unimportantly, the more offensive. How might rape victims feel about their trauma and injustice being analogized to a terrorist’s spending a few seconds under a wet towel?

The problem for Sullivan and his cohorts is that they cried wolf for five years and then a caterpillar showed up. The memos are out; the methods known; and Americans are, for the most part, simply happy to have been kept safe. No reasonable politician wants to send the Bush administration to jail for wetting three known terror masterminds. And no decent person wants to see a picture of Lynndie England for the umpteenth time. The anti-Bush brigade have taken a deeply serious question and turned it into a sensational circus.

The kicker is that that’s the good news. The bad news is: we in essence invited the jihadists into top level national security meetings, unclassified every important document, translated it all for them to read, provided visual aids, apologized for any hard feelings, and assured them we’d ease up from here on in. Talk about a “form of mastery.”