"Vice President Dick Cheney has confirmed that U.S. interrogators subjected captured senior al-Qaida suspects to a controversial interrogation technique called 'water-boarding,' which creates a sensation of drowning. Cheney indicated that the Bush administration doesn't regard water-boarding as torture and allows the CIA to use it." (story) So this is how this works: We do not torture, because we don't consider anything we do to be torture. That's not going to work, though, because waterboarding is considered to be torture by, for example, human rights organizations (see, for example, here), and whether Mr Cheney considers it not to be torture is irrelevant (unfortunately not for the people subjected to torture).
