Waterboarding isn't torture, but the Supreme Court's Hamdan ruling is. Money quote:
The court tortures the reading of Common Article 3 to confer upon Hamdan - and by extension the man for whom he rode shotgun, bin Laden - the kind of elaborate legal protections that one expects from "civilized peoples." [My italics].
The word is deliberate and the logic for an unaccountable, unchecked executive power inescapable. Yes, there is such a thing as emergency power. But when the emergency is permanent, when the war is defined as indefinite, when it ends only when the executive says so, then we are talking about something different: a reordering of the constitutional system to create a neo-monarchy, licensed indefinitely to torture, capture, wire-tap and imprison, regardless of the rule of law, or the guilt or innocence of its victims. But, hey, that's now the conservative mainstream, as I have been forced to recognize. I might as well get used to it.