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Indeed, our very own government says that what John McCain suffered in Vietnam is not defined as torture. Andrew Sullivan makes a very good point:

It involved sleep deprivation, the withholding of medical treatment, stress positions, long-time standing, and beating. Sound familiar?

According to the Bush administration's definition of torture, McCain was therefore not tortured.

Cheney denies that McCain was tortured; as does Bush. So do John Yoo and David Addington and George Tenet. In the one indisputably authentic version of the story of a Vietnamese guard showing compassion, McCain talks of the agony of long-time standing. A quarter century later, Don Rumsfeld was putting his signature to memos lengthening the agony of "long-time standing" that victims of Bush's torture regime would have to endure. These torture techniques are, according to the president of the United States, merely "enhanced interrogation."

So, when American soldiers suffer the same fate in some future war (or next week in Iraq or Afghanistan), we as the people of this nation cannot complain that they are being tortured. Why? Because our own government, that we elected, says it is not torture.

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