Greenspirit, re: "The torture ruckus the hard left wants to talk about ad naseum is a bunch of silly noise. If preventing someone from getting sleep and living with a caterpillar in a small space constitutes torture, then we've been torturing every service men and woman for decades."
This is not a one dimensional, flat world issue. Except for those tortures that fall at the extremes, you'd have to look at all the circumstances before you could make a determination regarding whether certain practices constituted "torture".
This should have been clear to anyone who had taken the time to discuss this but you seem to have missed the nuances so let's look at a few possibilities.
Is it torture to force someone to bend over and touch his, or her, toes? No, but does it become torture if you force them to maintain that position for 10 minutes, an hour, or maybe 24 hours? Try it for 10 minutes and see of you get some hints.
Is it torture to allow a volunteer to experience a brief episode of drowning? You could argue that it isn't, but does it become torture if they don't volunteer, you force substantially more water into their lungs, make them believe you don't care if they live or die and do it over and over, again and again?
And torture is not simply the activity, it's a combination of the activity and the individual. Is it torture to put a man in a small space with a bug? Who knows? What man, what bug and what space?
Of course maybe those of us on the "left" simply don't understand that those of you on the not-left can shrug off hours of extreme discomfort, sleep deprivation and techniques designed to attack your basic survival instincts. After all that hero of the right, John Wayne, did it many times and others of us are so masochistic that we pay people to beat us. Maybe that's the difference between Americans like you and those of us on the "left?"
So I'd like to see you deprived of sleep for days (how do you think they'd keep you awake?). If you're not a closet "lefty" I'm assuming you'd be ready to do it again, still confidently insisting that viewing sleep deprivation as torture is a bunch of "silly noise."
Or maybe not.
You might want to actually read up on the science of the effects of forcing people to stay awake for days. Ed
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