Max, the discussion of waterboarding and torture has taken a fascinating turn in the past few years, because it involves a redefinition of “torture.” As universally understood, torture is the infliction of physical injury through the application of physical force. It is the negation, the reverse image, of medical care. The monstrous intent of torture is, literally, to cause physical injury. That injury need not be permanently scarring or even temporarily bruising to be torture, as in the disgusting use of electric current, but it must be an actual injury in any case.

Punishment techniques like waterboarding were invented precisely not to be acts of torture as commonly understood, but rather to simulate acts of torture. In the case of waterboarding, the intent is not to drown or nearly to drown (a classic torture method) but to invoke the primal fear of drowning. In both cases, of course, the purpose is to cause the sufferer to become so fearful that he will do whatever it takes not to endure the experience again. But when someone’s head is held under water, he may actually be drowned. When someone is waterboarded, he will not.

Waterboarding is clearly psychologically brutal, in that it induces raw panic. But it is not physically brutal. It is actually an avoidance of physical brutality. Now, we enlightened folk are, of course, keenly aware of the fragility of the psyche and the seriousness of mental trauma, so much so that the word “traumatized” is now used exclusively as a description of a spiritual state and not a physical one.

It is perhaps to be expected that the enlightened would choose to equate actual injuries that leave actual scars with psychic game-playing that leaves people shaken and terrified. But by claiming there is no difference between savage physical acts that cause savage physical harm and an unquestionably gruesome fake-out like waterboarding, the enlightened are guilty of profound rhetorical injury themselves.