There may not be much point in trying to relitigate the torture question from the Bush years, but every once in a while that era's torture apologists come back around to make their case, and there is one vital question I've never heard any of them answer: How do the defender's of "enhanced interrogation" (perhaps the most vulgar euphemism since "ethnic cleansing") define torture? I'll explain more in a moment, but this was prompted by an op-ed in Sunday's Washington Post about the film Zero Dark Thirty by Jose Rodriguez, a CIA officer who has defended the administration's torture program on many occasions. Since I haven't seen the film I can't say anything about the way it depicts torture, but Rodriguez takes the opportunity to say this: "I was intimately involved in setting up and administering the CIA's 'enhanced interrogation' program, and I left the agency in 2007 secure in the knowledge not only that our program worked - but that it was not torture." And why aren't the things the CIA did-which included waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and the use of "stress positions," which are used to cause excruciating pain without leaving a mark-torture? Here's the closest Rodriguez comes to an explanation:

Detainees were given the opportunity to cooperate. If they resisted and were believed to hold critical information, they might receive - with Washington's approval - some of the enhanced techniques, such as being grabbed by the collar, deprived of sleep or, in rare cases, waterboarded. (The Justice Department assured us in writing at the time that these techniques did not constitute torture.) When the detainee became compliant, the techniques stopped - forever.

You see, they had a memo saying that what they were doing wasn't torture, so there you go. And when the detainee became compliant, they stopped! It obviously can't be torture if it ends when the subject is broken, right?

Here's the question I've never heard someone like Rodriguez answer: Can you give a definition of torture that wouldn't include waterboarding, stress positions, and sleep deprivation? I have no idea what such a definition might be, and I have to imagine that if they had any idea they would have offered one. Because here's the definition of torture you'd think everyone could agree on: Torture is the infliction of extreme suffering for the purpose of extracting information or a confession. That's not too hard to understand. The point is to create such agony that the subject will do anything, including give you information he'd prefer not to give you, to make the suffering stop. That's the purpose of waterboarding, that's the purpose of sleep deprivation (which, by the way, has been described by those subjected to it in places like the Soviet gulag to be worse than any physical pain they had ever experienced), and that's the purpose of stress positions. The "enhanced" techniques that were used weren't meant to trick detainees or win them over, they were meant to make them suffer until they begged for mercy.

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So to repeat: If what the Bush administration did wasn't torture, how would its apologists define the term?