The New York Times will now use the word “torture” to describe any incident in which interrogators "inflicted pain on a prisoner in an effort to get information," a reversal from the paper's previous policy of referring to "harsh" or "brutal" interrogation methods.

The change was announced late Thursday in a note from executive editor Dean Baquet.

"Over time, the landscape has shifted," Baquet wrote. "Far more is now understood, such as that the C.I.A. inflicted the suffocation technique called waterboarding 183 times on a single detainee and that other techniques, such as locking a prisoner in a claustrophobic box, prolonged sleep deprivation and shackling people’s bodies into painful positions, were routinely employed in an effort to break their wills to resist interrogation."

"Meanwhile, the Justice Department, under both the Bush and Obama administrations, has made clear that it will not prosecute in connection with the interrogation program," he continued. "The result is that today, the debate is focused less on whether the methods violated a statute or treaty provision and more on whether they worked – that is, whether they generated useful information that the government could not otherwise have obtained from prisoners. In that context, the disputed legal meaning of the word 'torture' is secondary to the common meaning: the intentional infliction of pain to make someone talk."