John McCain on solitary confinement as torture:

[tpsbmam]

From a 2009 New Yorker article titled "Hell Hole."

“It’s an awful thing, solitary,” John McCain wrote of his five and a half years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam—more than two years of it spent in isolation in a fifteen-by-fifteen-foot cell, unable to communicate with other P.O.W.s except by tap code, secreted notes, or by speaking into an enamel cup pressed against the wall. “It crushes your spirit and weakens your resistance more effectively than any other form of mistreatment.” And this comes from a man who was beaten regularly; denied adequate medical treatment for two broken arms, a broken leg, and chronic dysentery; and tortured to the point of having an arm broken again. A U.S. military study of almost a hundred and fifty naval aviators returned from imprisonment in Vietnam, many of whom were treated even worse than McCain, reported that they found social isolation to be as torturous and agonizing as any physical abuse they suffered.

That same article, which you know McCain read and I have to think others who are now minimizing Manning's treatment, noted the following:

And what happened to them was physical. EEG studies going back to the nineteen-sixties have shown diffuse slowing of brain waves in prisoners after a week or more of solitary confinement. In 1992, fifty-seven prisoners of war, released after an average of six months in detention camps in the former Yugoslavia, were examined using EEG-like tests. The recordings revealed brain abnormalities months afterward; the most severe were found in prisoners who had endured either head trauma sufficient to render them unconscious or, yes, solitary confinement. Without sustained social interaction, the human brain may become as impaired as one that has incurred a traumatic injury.

And this:

Most hostages survived their ordeal, Fletcher said, although relationships, marriages, and careers were often lost. Some found, as John McCain did, that the experience even strengthened them. Yet none saw solitary confinement as anything less than torture.

And this:

Craig Haney, a psychology professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz, received rare permission to study a hundred randomly selected inmates at California’s Pelican Bay supermax, and noted a number of phenomena. First, after months or years of complete isolation, many prisoners “begin to lose the ability to initiate behavior of any kind—to organize their own lives around activity and purpose,” he writes. “Chronic apathy, lethargy, depression, and despair often result. . . . In extreme cases, prisoners may literally stop behaving,” becoming essentially catatonic.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/30/090330fa_fact_gawande#ixzz1H3Yhenc7 There's much more to read in this article.

Of course, it's torture when he's involved. For Manning, it apparently isn't. I couldn't remember what McCain had said about Manning's case so I Googled and went through 5 pages of results. This is the only quote I could find:

In a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing Thursday, Sen. John McCain (R) of Arizona called the case “the greatest disclosure of classified information in the history of the country.”

I don't find McCain's silence about Bradley Manning's torture at all surprising -- this is who he has become in his dotage. I do find it to be the very essence of hypocrisy and I find it totally repugnant, as is so much of what he does and says these days.

:grr: :grr:


(Apologies if this has already been posted.)

[Ilsa]

1. K&R for medical Facts. nt