It's not so big a deal in the grand scheme of things. But language matters. Here's a sentence from the New York Times Book Review:

During George W. Bush’s first term, Yoo served in the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department, where he wrote memos that asserted the president had the power to authorize the use of interrogation techniques like waterboarding, instigate a program of warrantless wiretapping and detain certain enemy combatants without applying the Geneva Conventions.

Waterboarding is not now and never has been, under any legal, moral or historical authority, an interrogation technique. No one can be "interrogated" with a cloth across their face and water poured over them to bring them to the point of drowning 183 times. They can merely be tortured, and then their broken psyche can be questioned.

That the NYT, that Isaacson and Tanenhaus, two decent and intelligent and humane people, should now be forced by style manuals to say that torture is something else, suggests how far we've come. And how fast. It is unimaginable, for example, that a book review about, say, the Khmer Rouge, would ever refer to their waterboarding as an "interrogation technique".

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