Previous studies showed that, once the Bush administration started waterboarding people, major media outlets stopped referring to the method as torture.
Townshend shared track Guantanamo on his 70th birthday, incorporating the usual festive messages about an American prison on Cuban land that employs interrogation methods classed as torture, force-feeds prisoners and has been known to detain people without charge for years.
Rendition involves sending a person from one country to another for imprisonment and interrogation, possibly by methods such as torture, that would be illegal in the country doing the rendering.
News organizations have wrestled with whether to label the brutal methods unequivocally as torture in the face of some government officials' claims that they were not.
If a state is pathologically focused on avoiding errors of omission it will become so desperate for intelligence that it is willing to use unreliable information, even if it means employing proscribed methods such as torture to obtain it.
Mr. Jarrett's report could become the first public accounting for legal advice that endorsed methods widely denounced as torture by human rights groups and legal authorities.
An official familiar with a still-incomplete investigation by the Democratic staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee said the evidence did not support Mr. Rodriguez's assertion that the rough methods, widely condemned as torture, were necessary.
One of the sources said that the Red Cross described the agency's detention and interrogation methods as tantamount to torture, and declared that American officials responsible for the abusive treatment could have committed serious crimes.
