Is THIS torture?

Somehow, in all my ranting about the Bush Administration’s torture of terror suspects, I missed this little nugget of information from the Binyamin Mohamed case in the U.K.

The 25 lines edited out of the court papers contained details of how Mr Mohamed’s genitals were sliced with a scalpel and other torture methods so extreme that waterboarding, the controversial technique of simulated drowning, “is very far down the list of things they did,” the official said.

Whether we get to directly see those 25 lines of redacted material is very much an open question at this point.

But assuming it bears out, it raises an interesting question. Waterboarding’s defenders have said that — despite centuries of tradition calling the practice “torture” — it isn’t really torture. I suspect many of them aren’t being entirely honest; they realize that admitting the practice constitutes torture is admitting that the United States as a matter of policy committed war crimes. What they’re really saying, in my humble opinion, is that torture is justified in the name of national security.

If they’re being honest about waterboarding, however, I wonder if they can possibly make the case that genital slicing isn’t torture. I can’t imagine a sane universe in which that would be the case; the word “torture” would lose all meaning if it doesn’t.