CapitalistImperialistPig

Andrew Sullivan , former Bush fan and relentless persecutor of all who differed with Bush's war, has this: We knew this already but it's always helpful to be reminded: Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago that sleep deprivation was perhaps the worst torture inflicted on the prisoners. Interestingly, torture was also illegal in the Soviet Union, and sleep deprivation, extreme temperatures, and stress positions were merely considered coercive methods. At the end of interrogation, prisoners had to sign a statement affirming that they had not been tortured and that they had given their confessions in full awareness of their rights. Here's an account of a Rumsfeld and Bush approved interrogation of one detained enemy combatant: In one of the few actual logs we have of a high-level interrogation, that of Mohammed al-Qhatani (first reported in TIME), doctors were present during the long process of constant sleep deprivation over 55 days, and they induced hypothermia and the...

Andrew Sullivan takes the occasion of the opening of the new movie Amazing Grace to note the link between slavery and torture: As Scott Horton explains more fully here, when Wilberforce and Wesley aimed to persuade the British elites that the slave trade was evil, they did not cite Biblical proscriptions against slavery. Why? Because the Bible is actually very ambiguous about slavery (the Southern Baptist Convention even used scripture to defend slavery in America). So Wilberforce stressed that the slave trade required unspeakable cruelty, abuse and torture of its victims. That was his rhetorical gambit. He framed his case against the slave trade as a case against inhumane treatment of prisoners of war. He points out that torture is an essential ingredient of slavery. Of course, Andy being Andy, he can't resist trying to make it an equivalence relation. That dodo, though, won't fly. Not that Cheney or Bush is likely to have any more respect for the Bible than they have for t...