Kathryn, I agree with you, entirely. I often read about political prisoners in such places as China and Cuba. Now and then, I meet former prisoners. And then I read about what the U.S. government has done to certain detainees. And the same word, “torture,” cannot be applied to both situations. Given the differences between what the Chinese and Cubans do, and what the U.S. government does, there must be two words, at least.

And that is quite apart from the differences between the types in captivity: on one hand, democrats, dissenters, human-rights advocates; on the other hand, terrorists.

And that is to say nothing about the reasons for what is meted out to these captives: on one hand, torture to punish, to degrade, and to prevent further democratic activity — not to mention the sheer pleasure derived by the torturers; on the other hand, “enhanced interrogation” in order to elicit information to prevent the further murder of innocents.

You should see the e-mails I get, labeling me a torture apologist. The moral idiocy of people — their sheer inability to think — is astounding.

Let me quote something I quoted in my Impromptus Tuesday: It is an excerpt from a letter to the U.S. Congress from Geng He, the wife of Gao Zhisheng, a Chinese defense lawyer who has been “disappeared”:

On the night of September 21, 2007, my husband, with a black hood thrown over his head, was kidnapped and brought to an unknown location. For 59 days, many people tortured and ravaged him in all kinds of ways, including beating him with an electric prod, inserting bamboo sticks into his reproductive organs, holding lit cigarettes close to his eyes and nose, etc., so that his eyes would burn and he would be forced to inhale smoke. My husband told me later that he was in such unbearable pain at the time that his sweat, blood, and other bodily fluids covered the floor.

Etc., etc. I could quote to you much worse. Read about Gao Zhisheng, read Armando Valladares, read The Gulag Archipelago — and then come back and talk to me about torture. I don’t say that waterboarding is a picnic, and I don’t even say it is justified or desirable (though I suspect it is). I’m just saying: It would be well for people to try a little discrimination. It would be well for them not to forsake their faculties of judgment.

Bill Buckley used to be exasperated with people who say, “The ends never justify the means.” He would say (and I paraphrase), “Yes, they can. Say one man pushes an old lady into the way of an onrushing bus, and another man pushes an old lady out of the way of an onrushing bus. Is the point about the two men that they’re the type to push old ladies around?”

I might add that this does not quite apply to Chinese and Cuban torture, versus U.S. practices: They are not all “pushing old ladies around.” Compared with what the Chinese and Cubans do, waterboarding is . . . well, something less torturous.

A final note: On the Corner yesterday, I had an item about the corruption of language by political correctness, and I mentioned some Obamesque euphemisms: “Overseas Contingency Operations” instead of “War on Terror” (which some feel is itself euphemistic); “man-caused disasters” instead of “terrorism.” And several readers wrote me to say, “You forgot ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ for ‘torture.’ Ha, ha, ha, you hypocrite!”

Okay. But if we call waterboarding torture, and I guess I’m willing to — what do we call the kind of torture that Gao Zhisheng, and Falun Gong practitioners, and Cuban democrats are being subjected to right this second? “Real torture”? “Serious torture”?

You see where a little thinking is required, and not the mere jerking of knees.