Is Water Boarding Torture- The Discussion Continues

I am not sure from a Catholic standpoint the argument on torture is so clear cut. I am still up in the air about water boarding for instance.

Cajun Hugenot talks about his personal experiences with it at Water Board Repeat . I think he makes a case. The problem is that in some ways it is subjective. For instance Christopher Hitchens went through it and says oh yeah it is torture. I guess though that is what makes this so hard to discern.

I think one of the best resources on this Discussion is at Against the Grain.

In that series of posts and links there is referenced a pretty good article by Fr. Brian Harrison . See :
Torture and Corporal Punishment as a Problem in Catholic Moral Theology: Part I - The Witness of Sacred Scripture

Torture and Corporal Punishment as a Problem in Catholic Moral Theology: Part II. The Witness of Tradition and Magisterium

In part two he makes an interesting observation

there remains the question – nowadays a very practical and much-discussed one – of torture inflicted not for any of the above purposes, but for extracting life-saving information from, say, a captured terrorist known to be participating in an attack that may take thousands of lives (the now-famous ‘ticking bomb’ scenario).

As we have noted above, this possible use of torture is not mentioned in the Catechism. If, as I have argued, the infliction of severe pain is not intrinsically evil, its use in that type of scenario would not seem to be excluded by the arguments and authorities we have considered so far.

(John Paul II’s statement about the "intrinsic evil" of a list of ugly things including torture in VS #80 does not seem to me decisive, even at the level of authentic, non-infallible, magisterium, for the reasons I have already given in commenting above on that text.) My understanding would be that, given the present status questionis, the moral legitimacy of torture under the aforesaid desperate circumstances, while certainly not affirmed by the magisterium, remains open at present to legitimate discussion by Catholic theologians.

So we are left with the question of if purpose and intent come into play perhaps.

For instance I think it would be absurd to say the U.S. govt is practicing torture on it's servicemen in order to prepare them for battle and possible horrific scenarios. In other words I have a hard time seeing that what Cajun Hugenot went under was torture.

For instance in the movie GI Jane we saw some horrific scenes as the Navy Seals were going through a mock capture exercise. Can someone call that torture? It might be torture if they were afflicting it on the enemy but the act itself as to that scene seems to bring in intent.

Just food for thought.