Over the last couple of months, conservatives’ rhetoric when it comes to torture-by-waterboarding has taken a turn for the worse. Not too long ago, the right argued that waterboarding is a necessary evil — torture is wrong, they’d say, but in extreme, Jack-Bauer-like circumstances, maybe the nation should tolerate waterboarding for the worst of the worst.<\/p>\n
That was the talking point in, say, the spring. More recently, the right has tried out a new tack: waterboarding isn’t a necessary evil, it’s hardly a big deal at all<\/a>.<\/p>\n Yesterday on PBS’s Newshour, host Gwen Ifill asked Sen. Kit Bond (R-MO) whether waterboarding constitutes torture. Bond replied that the technique is actually more like “swimming”:<\/p>\n GWEN IFILL: Do you think that waterboarding, as I described it, constitutes torture?<\/p>\n SEN. KIT BOND: There are different ways of doing it. It’s like swimming, freestyle, backstroke.<\/b> The waterboarding could be used almost to define some of the techniques that our trainees are put through, but that’s beside the point. It’s not being used.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Republican \u201cstrategist\u201d Rachel Marsden recently said<\/a> on CNN, \u201cOne man\u2019s torture is another man\u2019s CIA-sponsored swim lesson.\u201d<\/p>\n But Marsden is just some right-wing flack — Kit Bond is the ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee<\/a>.<\/p>\n