And thank YOU for the passive-aggression Larry, and for the veiled threat to "block" those who expose your laziness as such.  Is your confidence in your position really that frail?

You and your supporters introduced legal sources to this debate as authority for your statement that it's torture.  Fine, but if you're going to do that, you open the door to legal criticism of your incorrect use of the sources.  I just gave you several specific reasons why your methodology was flawed and you're trying to side-step the points I raised.  Fair enough...let readers decide.

I've read several of your other posts on here and I must say that your epistemological position seems to me incoherent: on the one hand you tell those who disagree with you that they must cite reliable sources for the proposition that such-and-such is not x, when the fact is that the burden of proof is on YOU Larry, and those who want to be able to make the statement that "waterboarding is torture."  This is a cheap debater's trick and it inhibits the productivity of producing genuine factual knowledge for the consumers of Wikipedia.  The burden of proof is never on the person seeking to prove a negative, but on the person seeking to prove that a proposition is valid.  You cannot seek refuge in "consensus," when there clearly is NO demonstrable consensus on the issue  which is part of why this issue is so controversial (and by the way, what comprises consensus anyway? 51% agree? 75%? 95%?...the standard is squishy to begin with, but then again, I'm not the one appealing to consensus as authoritative here).

You're also being weasely when you suggest that all you want to be able to do is to say that "x is x," when what you really want to be able to say is that "y is x."  Comprende?  The fact that something is debatable and can be qualified (or rather buried in the part of the article few will ever read) further down does not justify an editorial decision to report that "y is x," because some other dilettante said so.  By now, it's pretty transparent that your intent is to use the lead to advance your political bias on this issue.  You know that most readers will never get beyond the first paragraph which is why you're willing to cite "non-consensus" views where nobody will ever see them.  How noble of you!

And frankly, to equate that authoritativeness of the U.S. Supreme Court or The Hague or any other who has professional responsibilities for which they have consequential accountability with the authoritativeness of an opinionated journalist or law professor blogger (who, incidentally, hasn't necessarily ever had to pass the Bar) seems childish and dangerous.  At a minimum, it does violence to the notion of reason to put those two "sources" on the same level of authoritativeness.72.244.113.169