Waterboarding somebody 183 times is not a ticking time bomb scenario and has nothing whatsoever do do with national security. It was punishment, a medical experiment on prisoners, a training exercise and a legal defense, all wrapped up into one, giant war crime.

Waterboarding a man 183 times is punishment in it's purest, most vindictive form. He did this to President Bush's country and Bush made him suffer.

Waterboarding a man 183 times is a medical experiment on a prisoner. Doctors dutifully signed off that the prisoner didn't get any broken bones or internal organ damage. Interrogators refined their techniques and learned how much they could torture a man without meeting Bush's legal definition of "torture."

Waterboarding a man 183 times is a training exercise. George W. Bush wanted prisoners to be tortured. He must have found it lamentable that after so many years of obeying the law, nobody really knew how. Whole departments had to be brought up to speed. The torturers needed practice.

Finally, and worst of all, waterboarding a man 183 times is a legal defense. If anyone were to be prosecuted, and President Obama says they won't be, the prisoner's medical records from the experiments would no doubt be used as evidence. The defendants would claim that yes, we were really mean. But the prisoner suffered no permanent harm and therefore he wasn't really tortured.