People forget that a lot of the victims of Stalinist repression in period 1937-38 confessed to bizarre conspiracies to take down the Soviet state. Many of the people who signed these confessions were loyal Communist Party officials who took part in the October Revolution.

How did the Soviet secret police get loyal Communists to sign confessions to conspiring against Communism?

Sleep deprivation and torture. Stalin was able to manufacture vast artificial conspiracies against the state by making his prisoners psychotic with sleep deprivation and then torturing them into false confessions.

This is why I do not believe that torture, or whatever this administration wants to call it, can give us reliable information that we can use to protect our country against terrorists.

You don't know that someone is telling the truth just because they've been tortured.

There were thousands upon thousands of false confessions tortured out of people by Communists.

And now it even makes me sick that I need to invoke Stalin and Communism in a discussion of American policy.

Eeewww ick ick ick I need to go wash my hands.

to stop torturing yourself. Fold up your campaign and get some sleep.

Unlike tough-guy wannabes like Giuliani and the rest of the Rethug presidential hopefuls, McCain has personal experience of being imprisoned, tortured, and forced to sign a false confession by the North Vietnamese when he was a POW.

Maybe what we finally need to do, so the American public can finally understand what's going on, is to have a prime time, 6:00 news segment on NBC/CBS/ABC where they waterboard a volunteer in order to show how terrible it is.

And then they should show clips of the Republican primary debates and point out exactly who believes the practice is okay.

As terrible as the experience is, I'm sure they could find somebody to demonstrate the depravity of the situation. Heck, I'm certain they could find some guys from MTV's JackASS who would jump at the chance, especially if they lean progressively.

There was a time and place where the concept of Americans torturing prisoners was abhorrent and terrifying. I'm sure that there have been some evil, disgusting people in the intelligence fields, and even in the military, who participated in these acts, but as Joe Conason pointed out, we rightfully prosecuted these perpetrators.

How can we dare claim to have the moral authority to persecute such acts against our own soldiers and civilians if we can not abstain from perpetrating, and prosecuting, such acts ourselves?

In the video, he said that torture isn't about them, it's about us. The fact that George Bush has been president for two terms and Guiliani is the front runner says a lot about us.

Somewhere in TV land I have already seen waterboarding done with a volunteer (I think it was a military person) to demonstrate the technique. Of course the U.S. should not torture people ever. It doesn't work. The tortured tell the torturers whatever they think the torturers want to hear. And the process can't be good for the souls of the torturers either. And never forget that Rudy was the genius who decided to put the NY Emergency Management office in the World Trade Center complex AFTER the Trade Center had been attacked in 1993. He's mean and creepy and stupid. Happy Halloween.

Why did I say that? I don't know. Because it's so hard to come up with something to say to such deliberately callous cruelty. How can he say he's not really familiar with it? That alone is as damning as anything else he could have said. I didn't really know what it is either, a couple of years ago, but when I heard that MY COUNTRY was using it as part of its regular practice, i instantly DID SOME RESEARCH! With the internet so handy, there is no excuse not to. It took me all of 5 seconds to be reading one of many articles about it.

And sleep deprivation? If Rudy is as "tortured" as he thinks he is, it could explain a lot. He's just looney at this point, spewing anything that comes to mind, no filters in place. But as tired as he is, I bet he also hasn't been forced to stay on his feet for a day, and kept awake with buckets of ice water, and then, dripping wet, had to go out and make his usual stump speech.

But as someone else said further up the thread (or was it in Joe's column), the fact that Rudy views making these ridiculous tough guy statements as a vote attractor speaks volumes about the decadence of American society.

I don't watch "reality teevee", but I infer that waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and other forms of "enhanced interrogation" haven't yet been demonstrated on "Survivor", or "Fear Factor", or that wildly popular "Lord of the Flies" ripoff.

I think these practices ought to be intentionally incorporated into these shows-- including "American Gladiator" if it's been revived as rumored. After all, the participants sign on knowing that pain and discomfort-- even injury-- are part of the bargain. So they ought to be up for it.

Then at least we'll get a feel for whether the target demographic-- low-brow Yahoo masses-- are appropriately revolted and outraged by such practices, or whether they're enthusiastically applauded as Good Clean Fun. If the masses rebel, the political elite might react constructively-- clearly, politicians are incapable or unwilling to act on mere principle.

Frankly, I can't predict what the response would be. But if there isn't a tsunami of public righteous indignation, we might as well stop trying to slide further down the slippery slope of 21st-Century barbarism.

What the fuck is going on with this country?

Wind the clock back 10 years. Can you even believe we are having this discussion?

Giuliani is the GOP frontrunner? In a country where some of the highest rated TV shows are comprised of idiots eating worms? I bet you'd have millions of these people cheering on participants in a torture reality show and fools would line up a thousand deep to go on TV and see who could last the longest during waterboarding. Our country is a mess. If Giuliani becomes our next president, millions of us will be trying to sneak into Mexico.