Waterboarding is not torture. That's what Dubya, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, and whole slew of other top officials of the last Bush administration have declared.

I don't know. Maybe torture is like pornography. You can't define it, but you know it when you see it.

When you are waterboarded, they take you and strap you upside-down to a board on a wall with your hands lashed to your sides. Your ankles are held tight, and a metal clamp is tightened around your neck. Then, they put your head in a bucket and fill that bucket up with rushing water. You cannot move your head to get it out of the bucket, and your feet and hands are bound so that you cannot resist in any way.

The whole process is designed to simulate the experience of drowning.

Now, if that's not torture, it will certainly do until something that is torture comes along!

Imagine being so helpless and having angry folks flushing torrents of water into the bucket to rush into your nose, your mouth, your eyes and your ears.

Not torture, huh?

I wonder if Mister Cheney, Mister Bush, Mister Rumsfeld or Ms. Rice would ever volunteer to give it a shot? You know, sort of like the dunking booth at the fireman's carnival?

How about subjecting their spouses, or their mothers, or their kids or grandkids to it? You know, just once. Just for laughs.

I think we all know the answers to those questions.

Why wouldn't they opt to experience it? Because the activity is torture, that's why.

Now, Mr. Cheney stated the other day that much sound information came from that activity.

I guess many "terrorists" confessed to their crimes after undergoing repeated turns on the waterboard. (Some endured the activity over two hundred times!)

If somebody did that to me, I'd confess and say ANYTHING that they wanted me to say after THE FIRST time! Most people would, and that is exactly why information obtained by such extreme methods is highly unreliable, and, often times, downright false. You'll say or do anything to make it stop!

And now, the Obama administration is considering prosecuting officials of the Bush administration for sanctioning such activities.

Conservatives are against such prosecutions because never before in history has the reigning administration sought legal retribution for actions committed by the previous administration when the previous administration was from the opposing party.

Well, never before in history has there been an administration like the Bush-Cheney administration that repealed so many civil liberties from its own citizens, isolated the US so sharply from the rest of the world, and sanctioned what any sane person would consider to be torture. Not only that, but this torture was perpetrated upon individuals who, at the time, had not even been charged with any crimes!

The international wounds inflicted by the insensitivity, sheer audacity, ignorance, stupidity and arrogance of the Bush-Cheney administration upon the world community are immense. Is there a country, other than England, that now trusts us and respects us? If you ask me, Obama has to prosecute these Nazis just to regain some credibility and respect from the rest of our neighbors who share this planet with us.

If they condoned torture, these folks are criminals, and they should be brought to justice, no matter what their motives or intentions where, and no matter what the results of these tortures were.