Dahlia Lithwick calls out the various outlets that ascribed "waterboarding" to the story of the US soldier who abused his 4-year-old daughter:
As Sullivan predicted, various right-wing bloggers flipped out because it isn't technically water-boarding if the victim isn't variously "strapped to a board" and the act isn't performed "by professionals in controlled conditions" while a "cloth is placed over the face and water is poured over the cloth."[...] But if the bloggers on the right are technically correct, they are also completely missing the point: The narrow legal question of whether or not Tabor "water-boarded" his daughter masks the outrageousness of the media's sudden willingness to embrace the word. Newspapers that have twisted themselves into pretzels to avoid using words like torture or even water-board have suddenly embraced the term in the sloppiest possible way.