All this via The Debate Link, one of my favorites.

I'd like to say that I've been looking for a long time for some appropriate measure of exactly how far back our respect for human rights has regressed over the course of the "war on terror," since we started waterboarding people and passing it off as practically offering a thirsty man a drink. That would be a lie. I have been searching for no such analogy, but I'm provided with one in the form of two court cases. The first was Fisher v. State, in which the Mississippi Supreme Court granted a retrial to a murderer whose confession had been obtained by waterboarding, explicitly referring to the tactic as "torture." Fisher cited the second case, White v. State, a similar decision rendered a few years before that described the tactic as "barbarous."

Here's the catch. Fisher called waterboarding "torture" in 1926. And White called it "barbarous" in 1922. Indeed, it was so barbarous that they reversed the conviction of a black man accused of killing a white man. In Mississippi. IN 1922.

Does this seem a little problematic to anyone but me?