Team-Building or Torture? Court Will Decide.

"We don't know what he was thinking, but we know that he wasn't thinking waterboarding, or torture," Brunt said. Christopherson, suspended for two weeks while the company investigated the incident, is back on the job. The company declined to allow interviews with him or other employees.

"The sales team leaders are very focused here," Brunt said. "There was an incident, so it's not fabricated. There was a training exercise. He did lie down on a hill. The entire exercise lasted less than 20 seconds. A little bit of water was poured and then Josh would stop and say, 'Are you okay?'

"I can't say he wasn't held down, but anybody holding him would have let him up if he'd held his hand up."

Such details are crucial, not least because under Utah law the case could be relegated to a workers' compensation claim absent an employer's "conscious and deliberate intent" to inflict injury.

"And I'm absolutely sure that won't be found," Brunt said. "And it'll be a workers' comp case, and he'll get what he needs. But we're not going to pay to keep it out of the media, though it's tempting."

That's because of the taint of the word, of course. "There's a debate in the Supreme Court whether it's torture or not," Ellis said. "I don't know, looking at the military filings, it looks pretty torturous."

Interestingly, Hudgens's Salt Lake City attorney differs on that. "I'm not an absolutist on that," Sean Egan said. But "to take these kinds of techniques and apply them to anything but a national security environment is entirely inappropriate."

And the plaintiff?

"I don't know if the government should do it or not," Hudgens said. "But I can tell you firsthand, because it happened to me, it definitely works.

"They didn't tell me it was going to happen, but if they did, holy cow, I would've told them whatever they wanted me to tell them."