by Sanford Levinson

For what it is worth, I note that Menachem Begin, generally not thought to be a particular bleeding heart liberal, wrote, with regard to his own experience of being tortured in the Soviet Union, that the spirit of a sleep-deprived prisoner "is wearied to death, his legs are unsteady, and he has one sole desire to sleep, to sleep just a little, not to get up, to lie, to rest, to forget. ... Anyone who has experience the desire knows that not even hunger or thirst are comparable it with it." It is foolish to assume that "torture" need involve the rack and the screw (or even waterboarding, which the U.S. seems to be moving away from). It is enough to keep people up for almost literally inhuman lengths of time. Or would anyone seriously argue that the sleep-deprivation apparently visited on Begin "really" wasn't "torture"? If so, what would such an argument be based on, beyond basically juvenile notions--drawn from reading too much action literature--that torture is necessarily restricted to certain kinds of inflictions of pain (or inductions of psychosis) and not others?

I am assuming, incidentally, that not feeding anyone or not providing anyone with water for, say, 36 hours, would count as torture (and, quite possibly, it wouldn't take 36 hours--that is the kind of judgment we might need "Dr. Frist" to make).