Was McCain tortured in Vietnam? Bush says "no"

by kos, Daily Kos

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.
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."
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?