What is it, then, a bath?

In the wake of this recent story (which I'm sure is making its way around corners of the country), does the administration really think it's fooling anybody anymore? I love how the White House insists that dunking people in water isn't "torture"...what would they call it? A friendly bath?

As a scholar who has examined military dictatorships and authoritarian states in random parts of the world in the 20th century, I could comment on how, among the numerous means of torture that authoritarian states throughout the 20th century on multiple continents employed, dunking "detainees's" heads in water as a means of torture in order to extract information was one of the most popular measures, but it just seems superfluous anymore.