Is it torture or not?

Here's House Minority Leader John Boehner(R-OH) at a news conference yesterday:

Last week, they released these memos outlining torture techniques. That was clearly a political decision and ignored the advice of their Director of National Intelligence and their CIA director

But before you applaud him for using the correct word to describe the illegal techniques employed by the Bush operatives, wait for his spokesman's retraction:

It is clear from the context that Boehner was simply using liberals' verbiage to describe these interrogation techniques.

No, what's clear is that the Congressmen committed a Kinsley gaffe. He told the truth by accident, then sent out a flack to clean up the political damage. (Bohner and other GOPniks would rather gnaw off their own arms than say "torture" yet they still will insist that only liberals play PC games.)