| | I posted this because, whatever my differences with McCain, we share the experience of having survived torture. In 1999, I spent 11 days in Monmouth County jail in New Jersey. While I was eventually able to prove my innocence (the charges were dismissed and the arrest record expunged) thanks to the work of a courageous and competent lawyer, the trauma of torture severely hampered my life for months afterward, and some of its effects are likely to stay with me for the rest of my life.
I spent the first night in jail in a "boat," a sleep-deprivation device now commonly used in civilian and military jails and prisons across America. The "boat" was invented by the StaSi secret police of former Communist East Germany, and was denounced as a torture device by the United States at the time. Long-term sleep deprivation was used by the former East Germany and the Soviet Union and its other satellites to induce symptoms of mental illness in otherwise healthy dissidents, to justify the incarceration of political dissidents in mental hospitals. Some state governments in the United States subsequently re-defined "torture" to exclude sleep deprivation from the new "legal definition" of torture. The "boat" is routinely used to make prisoners appear unbalanced and dangerous at hearings and trials. It is also used, as it was in my case, as a method of intimidation, intended to coerce plea bargains regardless of the prisoner's actual innocence or guilt.
I spent the entire 11 days in another torture device, a "freezer cell" refrigerated to about -30 degrees Celsius, in a sleeveless uniform - essentially a tank-top with pockets - without socks or tee shirt, or bedding other than a minuscule baby blanket. I was constantly threatened with a return to the "boat" unless I agreed to a false plea bargain. Having read the memoirs of Gulag survivors, I knew enough to wake up every hour for several minutes of vigorous exercise until my circulation was restored. Some other prisoners had the misfortune of sleeping beyond an hour at a time in the next freezer cell, and lost parts of their toes to frostbite.
On top of this, I was deprived for five days of my prostate medication. The pain of a bladder blocked by an unmedicated enlarged prostate is so intense that, back in the old days before prostate medications were invented, men gladly submitted to primitive surgery that made them incontinent and impotent for the rest of their lives just to be rid of the pain.
Some US State governments - including the Sopranos' domain of New Jersey and the US military under W have "redefined" torture to permit all of the above - the boat, the freezer, the deliberate infliction of extreme pain by depriving a prisoner of medically necessary medication - as "not rising to the level of torture." It is not conduct that can be humanly excused in - or on behalf of - a civilized country.
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