Waterboarding goes back at least to the Spanish American War. US soldiers used it then. The fuss about topic at the Huffington Post shows that they a) are still fighting the last war against Bush and Cheney, b) that when ISIS does something wrong it is mitigated by the fact that the US may have done something the Left deems wrong. This is just sloppy thinking, though or a deliberate red herring. While the end doesn’t justify the means, surely there is some difference between the use of something like waterboarding to stop terrorism and waterboarding simply to be cruel, to be a terrorist. This is exactly why the moral equivalent crew is so shallow and their sophistries should be exposed. Those who make excuses for Putin similarly like those who offer up rationales for ISIS make no distinction between the use of force to stop cruelty and those who want to build a new empire for cruelty.
Actually, waterboarding has been around for many many centuries.