The Wall Street Journal's shifting position on "waterboarding"

Andrew Sullivan is furious about the way that the Wall Street Journal softpedals "waterboarding" in this editorial:

As for "torture," it is simply perverse to conflate the amputations and electrocutions Saddam once inflicted at Abu Ghraib with the lesser abuses committed by rogue American soldiers there, much less with any authorized U.S. interrogation techniques. No one has yet come up with any evidence that anyone in the U.S. military or government has officially sanctioned anything close to "torture." The "stress positions" that have been allowed (such as wearing a hood, exposure to heat and cold, and the rarely authorized "waterboarding," which induces a feeling of suffocation) are all psychological techniques designed to break a detainee.

But as I noted back in January, the Journal conceded at the time that the technique is "pushing the boundary of tolerable behavior" and called for a debate about whether it was torture:

As for al Qaeda, let us describe the most coercive interrogation technique that was ever actually authorized. It's called "water-boarding," and it involves strapping a detainee down, wrapping his face in a wet towel and dripping water on it to produce the sensation of drowning. Is that "torture"? It is pushing the boundary of tolerable behavior, but we are told it is also used to train U.S. pilots in case they are shot down and captured. More to the critics' apparent point, is it immoral, or unjustified, in the cause of preventing another mass casualty attack on U.S. soil? By all means let's have a debate; Mr. Gonzales should challenge a few Democrats to categorically renounce it and tell us what techniques they would tolerate instead.

(See my posts on the subject from January and February for more on the definition of waterboarding.)

Comments

[John Tabin]

The two excerpts are entirely compatible. In the earlier editorial, they call on Democrats to stake out a position on waterboarding. In the later one, they stake out theirs. Where do you see any "shifting" of their position?