Gavin’s Gaily Gigest

Waterboarding is one of those delightful techniques the US intelligence services use to extract information from people when they’re fed up of asking questions (or when they haven’t asked any questions and just fancy inflicting pain on somebody else). It involves

"a person being stretched on his back or hung upside down, having a cloth pushed into his mouth and/or plastic film placed over his face and having water poured onto his face. He gags almost immediately."

And the US Government, pretty much alone in the world, claims it doesn’t qualify as torture. Of course, they define torture a little more narrowly than everyone else:

"Physical pain amounting to torture must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.

But this narrow definition of torture appears to apply only to non-US nationals, at least, according to the US Director of National Intelligence, speaking to the New Yorker:

If I had water draining into my nose, oh God, I just can’t imagine how painful! … Whether it’s torture by anybody else’s definition, for me it would be torture."