I'm having a definitional crisis. That's like an existential crisis, except that instead of being distressed about the meaninglessness of life, I'm fretting over the meaninglessness of words.

The word that has me so distraught is "drowning", as in "waterboarding is simulating drowning".

According to very reputable newspapers, today you're not drowning unless you die. To say otherwise would be to take a position on an allegedly controversial issue, something which objective journalists should avoid. If drowning meant anything but dying, then simulating that might be illegal and waterboarding would be torture and according to President Bush we don't torture. To disagree with the President would be to take sides.

Confession: I love dictionaries. I have several dictionaries of varying ages and bulk. I shop for words in dictionaries the way my grandmother shopped for shoes at Nieman Marcus.

My relatively simplistic Webster's Seventh Collegiate Dictionary defines to drown vt: "to suffocate by submersion" (to which Webster's 3rd Unabridged feels it is necessary to add "in a liquid"). The argument used by advocates of waterboarding is that unless the victim is actually submerged in a liquid, he's not really drowning.

It seems to me that all acts that achieve the same effect are synonymous. Our statutes against murder focus on the motive and outcome, not whether death was committed using a 9mm or .357. Therefore willful suffocation by forcible inhalation of a liquid is synonymous with drowning regardless of how the liquid came to fill the lungs. We believe it when we hear of people who drown in their own blood, yet we know very well they were not actually immersed in their own blood.

It also helps to understand that to suffocate vt means to stop the respiration of or to deprive of oxygen. We can ignore the intransitive form of suffocate (which means to die or to feel unable to breathe), because only the transitive definition of "to drown" is relevant to waterboarding. Prisoners haven't been shown to have waterboarded themselves yet, so the intransitive form could be misconstrued as resulting from torture and we don't torture. (I can hear Dubya now: "Liberals use big words like 'intransitive' to undermine our freedoms. We must stop at nothing to defend our homes against these intransitives that threaten to take our away our jobs and our guns." But I digress.

This is where my jesuit education kicks in. According to these dictionaries, if you survive drowning or suffocation, the event remains nonetheless a drowning or suffocation. Contrary to recent redefinitions by cable news network talking heads, drowning and suffocation don't necessitate death to be such, which is why we prefer to say "the child survived drowning with only minimal brain damage", rather than "the child avoided drowning with only minimal brain damage". The victim experienced drowning, regardless of the outcome.

So I think there's no such thing as "simulating drowning". It's either drowning because of the distress of the victim, or it's not. The victim either feels like he's suffocating, or he doesn't. He either dies drowning, or he survives drowning.

Like me you're probably no expert on torture, but it seems pretty obvious that killing the prisoner defeats the point of torture if the objective is to elicit information? Dead prisoners don't talk much, so extracting vital information by killing them seems pretty ineffective. (In fact, it also defeats the point if the objective is to inflict as much suffering prior to death as possible. Once again, I digress.)

At the risk of being too casuistic about it, either torture has an independent meaning and certain acts that fall short of killing the prisoner are too banned, or the ban on torture simply means you can't kill a prisoner, which I thought was already forbidden, regardless of the manner in which he dies, simulated or otherwise.

The bottom line is if we don't torture and neither do we kill, and torture means the same thing as killing, then why is it necessary for us to point out that we don't torture prisoners? Shouldn't it be enough to say that we don't kill prisoners?

Never mind. This is going nowhere.

I'm obviously still confused, so let's try looking at this alternatively from the perspective of the waterboarder and the waterboardee. To the waterboarder's eyes, the prisoner is a) clearly a terrorist, and b) clearly not dying. He is lying upside down, strapped to a board and he's having water into his nose and mouth until he talks or dies. Hopefully the bastard doesn't die before he talks, because all that paperwork will make you late for your son's little league game. It's just so sad to see the hurt in the little guy's eyes when you weren't there to see him hit that home run. It easy to empathize with those who just want to get home after a tough day at the office.

Now, let's look at it through the waterboardee's eyes. That's a bit harder because 1) you've never drowned (or you'd be dead, right?); 2) you've never simulated drowning yourself (there they go with those intransitives again); and 3) you're not a terrorist (or are you?). In spite of these serious character flaws, you try to picture the experience anyway. You were picked up on the streets of Kabul one day six years ago. (Has it been that long since you've seen your wife and kids? They must think you're dead. Widows and orphans don't do well.) You were taken after your shop was destroyed when the Taliban hiding in it (like you had a choice!) got shot up by Americans and you were flown to a prison someplace you've never heard of. And although you'd never done anything wrong, you actually liked America and you didn't know anything, here you are strapped upside down and blindfolded to a board with your nose and mouth filled with gallons of water. Fortunately, you got a lung full of air and you hold your breath as long as you can. But eventually panic sets in and you can't help but expel it. The air is immediately replaced with all that water, and you begin suffocating. It's dark and that fire in your chest makes you feel like you're drowning. You gasp and thrash to get air but to no avail. Thankfully, the veil of death from lack of oxygen eventually slips over you. Unfortunately, you don't die and wake up only to take another lung full of water. Each time you awake, you wonder why they don't just kill you. It would be so much better if they would just let you die. Ok, it's hard to empathize with those who want to die.

But, the U.S. government now says an act that makes a person think they're dying is not torture unless they actually die. That's because from the waterboarder's perspective dying is worse than living. It must be that through some lack of empathy, we fail to see it from the waterboardee's perspective: living is worse than dying. But he's a terrorists! Don't you want us to win?

Nope, that didn't help either. I still don't see it. It's all so confusing.

Ok, let's go back to how we defined waterboarding in the bad old days before morality was relative and before President Bush applied his extensive erudition to the question of right versus wrong. Maybe that'll help clear things up.

Way back in 1947, a U.S. military commission in Yokohama sentenced all four defendents in the case of United States of America vs. Hideji Nakamura, Yukio Asano, Seitara Hata and Takeo Kita, where water torture was among the acts alleged in the evidence presented against them.

Hata, the camp doctor, was charged with war crimes stemming from the brutal mistreatment and torture of Morris Killough "by beating and kicking him (and) by fastening him on a stretcher and pouring water up his nostrils." Other American prisoners, including Thomas Armitage, received similar treatment, according to the allegations. Armitage described his ordeal in this way: "They would lash me to a stretcher then prop me up against a table with my head down. They would then pour about 2 gallons of water from a pitcher into my nose and mouth until I lost consciousness."

Hata was sentenced to 25 years at hard labor, and the other defendants were convicted and given long stints at hard labor as well.

There's also the 1983 case out of Texas, in which James Parker, the San Jacinto County sheriff, and three deputies were criminally charged for handcuffing suspects to chairs, draping towels over their faces and pouring water over the towel until a confession was elicited. One victim described the experience this way: "I thought I was going to be strangled to death. ... I couldn't breath." The sheriff pleaded guilty and his deputies went to trial where they were convicted of civil rights violations. All received long prison sentences. U.S. District Judge James DeAnda told the former sheriff at sentencing, "The operation down there would embarrass the dictator of a country."

What's different about these cases is that the waterboarders were the bad guys, and the waterboardees were the good guys.

I get it now. If they do it to us, it's wrong, but if we do it to them, then it's right. That's what we mean by right versus wrong. That's moral relativism.

Now, that's a definition we can all agree on.

I feel much better now.