Waterboarding may be illegal, but "I would bring it back," says Donald Trump. Chris Christie says waterboarding isn't torture and he would use it against terror suspects. Jeb Bush won't rule it out. As for Marco Rubio, he vows to haul captured terrorists to Guantánamo Bay and "find out everything they know."

One year after a bracing Senate report on post-9/11 CIA interrogation practices led Congress to ban waterboarding and other forms of torture, the leading Republican presidential candidates are talking like it's 2002 all over again.

With one exception: Going against the GOP's rhetorical grain is Trump's main rival for the party's nomination, Ted Cruz. "Torture is wrong, unambiguously. Period. The end," the Texas senator said in December 2014. Cruz, whose own father was tortured in Cuba, reaffirmed that position last month, saying that "America does not need torture to protect ourselves."

But even Cruz's seemingly definitive rhetoric leaves key questions about his position unanswered.

"He says he opposes torture, but he does not say what constitutes torture," said Jack Goldsmith, an opponent of waterboarding and other severe interrogation tactics who headed the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel during the George W. Bush administration.