Good Point

I'm not voting for McCain, but I've got nothing against the man or his Vietnam service. It would be nice if he didn't try to hide behind the "but I was a POW" defense all the time, but I suppose that's par for the course. But that's not the good point.

This is, from Andrew Sullivan:

In all the discussion of John McCain's recently recovered memory of a religious epiphany in Vietnam, one thing has been missing. The torture that was deployed against McCain emerges in all the various accounts. 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.

* * *

No war crimes were committed against McCain. And the techniques used are, according to the president, tools to extract accurate information. And so the false confessions that McCain was forced to make were, according to the logic of the Bush administration, as accurate as the 'intelligence' we have procured from "interrogating" terror suspects. Feel safer?

Nope. But I do feel pissed, ashamed, and appalled.