Waterboarding = Torture?

Over the past couple years we've had an enormous amount of discussion in the press (and particularly in the blogs) about whether waterboarding is torture. Andrew Sullivan posted a letter from a reader who had undergone waterboarding which describes it in great detail.

This brings me to a peculiar passage in "The Lion and the Fox," James MacGregor Burns's political biography of FDR. Burns, when writing about FDR's time as a student at Groton during the 1890s, describes a practice called "pumping":

Another, also permitted by the faculty, was "pumping"- sixth formers (12 graders) would call out the name of an offender in study period, drag him quailing and shaking to a nearby lavatory, bend him face upward over a trough, and pour basins of water over his face and down his throat until he went through the sensations of drowning. (p. 11)

This seems to be awfully close to waterboarding as it has been described. It sounds horribly unpleasant, and I'm completely aware that in the 1890s (as well as now) teenage boys do terrible things to each other. The fact that it was allowed at Groton though seems to draw some kind of line where torture is on one side and pumping/waterboarding is on another. If this is something that schoolboys underwent on a semi-regular basis, (and apparently survived relatively unscathed, else the practice would have been outlawed), then perhaps it's qualitatively different from pulling out fingernails, melting the soles of the feet, etc.

This of course doesn't mean that it's a good idea for the US to engage in it- the perception that it's torture (with all the legal implications that implies for our allies and the PR advantage for our adversaries), along with the fact that coercive techniques seem to be useless for gathering advantage, outweigh any kind of benefit we're getting from the technique.