Yeah, yeah. I hear that's what the Commies used to say about the folks they used sleep deprivation on to get them to make false confessions.

Menachem Begin didn't think it was a big deal.

From The Dark Side by Jane Mayer

The effects of sleep deprivation ... were well known to be serious. Menachem Begin, the Israeli Prime Minister from 1977 to 1982, who was tortured by the KGB as a young man, described it as so difficult to withstand that it led quickly to false confessions. In his book White Nights: The Story of a Prisoner in Russia, he wrote, "In the head of the interrogated prisoner, a haze begins to form. His spirit is wearied to death, his legs are unsteady, and he has one sole desire: to sleep. Anyone who has experienced this desire knows taht not even hunger and thirst are comparable with it.

"I came across prisoners who signed what they were ordered to sign, only to get what the interrogator promised them. He did not promise them their liberty; he did not promise them food to sate themselves. He promised them - if they signed - uninterrupted sleep! And, having signed, there was nothing in the world that could move them to risk again such nights and such days."

A former CIA officer, knowledgeable and supportive of the terrorist interrogation program, said simply, "Sleep deprivation works. Your electrolyte balance changes. You lose all balance and ability to think rationally. Stuff comes out." But even in the Middle Ages, when it was called tormentum insomniae, professional torturers eschewed sleep deprivation, recognizing that the illusions and delusions it caused were more apt to produce false confessions than real ones. Historically, it was the favored choice only of witch hunters, who believed it accurately revealed evidence of pacts with the devil. For decades, it was defined in the United States as an illegal form of torture. An American Bar Association report, published in 1930 and cited in a later U.S. Supreme Court decision, said, "It has been known since 1500 at least that deprivation of sleep is the most effective torture and certain to produce any confession desired." But it became American policy in 2001, and continues to be.

Lincoln signed the Lieber Code which eventually became part of the inspiration for international laws of war.

"Military necessity does not admit of cruelty--that is, the infliction of suffering for the sake of suffering or for revenge, nor of maiming or wounding except in fight, nor of torture to extort confessions.” - The Lieber code, approved by Abraham Lincoln April 24, 1863

http://www.hrw.org/legacy/english/docs/2005/08/05/usdom11610.htm

The Geneva Conventions - the Limbaugh "conservatives" forget - are OUR values. Or at least they're supposed to be.

From The Dark Side by Jane Mayer

In the Revolutionary War, George Washington and the Contintenal Army were regarded by the British as treasonous, “illegal combatants” undeserving the protections of legitimate soldiers, the same category into which the Bush administration was casting terror suspects. As a result, the British freely brutalized and killed American prisoners of war, in conditions considered scandalous even in that day. In contrast, Washington ordered American troops to take a higher road in keeping with the ideals of the new republic. He insisted that enemy captives must be given food and medical attention and be housed in conditions that were no worse than those of the American soldiers. In directives still eloquent today, he ordered his troops to treat British war prisoners “with humanity, and let them have no reason to complain of us copying the brutal manner of the British Army … While we are contending for our own liberty we should be very cautious of violating the rights of conscience in others, ever considering that God alone is the judge of the hearts of men, and to Him only in this case, are they answerable.”

Washington’s orders, which became the backbone of American military doctrine until 2001, were not simply gestures of kindness or even morality. They sprang also from a shrewd calculation that brutality undermines military discipline and strengthens the enemy’s resolve, while displays of humanity could be used to tactical advantage. As David Hackett Fisher wrote in Washington’s Crossing, his Pulitzer Prize-winning history, the superior treatment of enemy captives by American soldiers bolstered their morale and fomented desertion among the British and Hessian soldiers. In so doing, he wrote, “They reversed the momentum of the war. They improvised a new way of war that grew into an American tradition. They chose a policy of humanity that aligned the conduct of the war with the values of the Revolution.”

It can't be emphasized that it was approved in 1863. In the middle of the biggest existential crisis the nation has ever faced torture was declared - in black and white terms - unacceptable.

hit enter too soon on the last one

Acts which, when ordered by Liberians, are "criminal torture" meriting life imprisonment magically become, when ordered by Americans, mere "aggressive interrogation techniques."

"Another thing that that inquiry, if it ever takes place, will have to deal with is the magical properties of names. Nearly all human beings feel that a thing becomes different if you call it by a different name." - George Orwell

And,of course,

"All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side ... The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them." - George Orwell, Notes on Nationalism