I suspect that if someone were to waterboard your sorry ass, you would admit it is torture in about 4.9 seconds.
Truly effective torture extracts the information without maiming the torturee, which reveals the cruelty.
This "it depends on what is meant by torture, what is waterboarding, etc., blah blah" is just a mantra that assholes like the CIA use to justify their systematic cruelty, which they have been famous for at least since Dan Mitrione was sent to Uruguay to teach torture to the goons of state security there and was captured and executed for it.
Hitler & Goebbels had this concept of the "Big Lie", in which you simply tell a really big lie over and over again until people believe you. It worked for them pretty well, hence the fact that when the death camps were captured by the Allies it was said to be a huge surprise. All this time the official Nazi line was that the camps were sort of like summer in the Catskills, like Teresianstadt.
Lie lie lie, and eventually the softer minded will agree. This always works. Goebbels knew this, but so does Procter & Gamble ands the entire advertising industry.
The Republicans are experts in cruelty. They destroy public housing, which has failed because of poor planning and lack of funds and replace it with nothing. Then they blame the homeless victims for their incompetence.
They refuse to tax the filthy rich and claim that there is no money for children's healthcare, so the children end up in the ER, and their teatment costs about ten times more, and is funded by the County and the City, which are controlled by Democrats, so then they can blame the Democrats.
Democrats are occasionally stupid and occasionally corrupt. The Republicans are nearly always cruel and nearly always dominated by greed.