If someone is waterboarded in the forest, is it torture?

After a rather uneventful first day of hearings for the Attorney General Nominee, Michael B. Mukasey (who I might start referring to as shifty bastard), the second day turned out to be a bit different. Day 1 was filled with lots of feel good folksy talk, but details were sparse. He said the first day that the president could not order torture;

“Torture is unlawful under the laws of this country,” Mr. Mukasey said. “It is not what this country is all about. It is not what this country stands for. It’s antithetical to everything this country stands for."

Bush says that the US doesn't torture. But as long as they dont die or have organ failure, it isn't torture. And those couple that did die were just accidents, and then a few suicides too. Oh yea and it's not torture if we send them to another country that will do it for us (now a major motion picture movie), kind of in the same way as it doesn't make you gay as long as your not the one doing the blowing.

So when he was asked to be more specific:

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse: “Is waterboarding constitutional?”

Mukasey: “I don’t know what is involved in the technique,” Mr. Mukasey replied. “If waterboarding is torture, torture is not constitutional.”

Whitehouse: “is the practice of putting somebody in a reclining position, strapping them down, putting cloth over their faces and pouring water over the cloth to simulate the feeling of drowning. Is that constitutional?”

Mukasey: “If it amounts to torture, it is not constitutional.”

Seems like the trend is to avoid direct talk, and invent a new word for what we do like 'terrorist surveillance program' or 'enhanced interrogation'

Extra: a short history on waterboarding from Dick Durbin:

The United States has long taken the position that this is a war crime. In 1901, the U.S. Army Major Edwin Glenn sentenced to 10 years hard labor for water-boarding a captured insurgent in the Philippines.

U.S. military commissions after World War II prosecuted Japanese troops for engaging in water-boarding. The torture statute makes it a crime to threaten someone with imminent death. Water- boarding is a threat of imminent death.

I'm hoping that you can at least look at this one technique and say that clearly constitutes torture, it should not be the policy of the United States to engage in water-boarding, whether the detainee is military or otherwise.

MUKASEY: It is not constitutional for the United States to engage in torture in any form, be it water-boarding or anything else.