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" Are we a nation of torturers? No, I&amp;#039;m not speaking of Guant\u00E1namo or anything we did in the war on terror. I&amp;#039;m talking about widespread torture of American citizens right now, constantly, all over the country. Consider this: When the lawyers of the Bush administration were trying to define torture, they had a special problem defining &amp;quot;severe mental pain.&amp;quot; Here is some of the language they used:  Section 2340(2) requires that the severe mental pain must be evidenced by &amp;quot;prolonged mental harm.&amp;quot; To prolong is to &amp;quot;lengthen in time&amp;quot; or to &amp;quot;extend the duration of, to draw out&amp;quot;... accordingly, &amp;quot;prolong&amp;quot; adds a temporal dimension to the harm to the individual, namely, that the harm must be one that is endured over some period of time ... For example, the mental strain experienced by an individual during a lengthy and intense interrogation - such as one that state or local police might conduct upon a criminal suspect - would not violate Section 2340(2). On the other hand, the development of a mental disorder such as posttraumatic stress disorder, which can last months or even years, or even chronic depression, which also can last for a considerable period of time if untreated, might satisfy the prolonged harm requirement... The next step for the Bush lawyers was to define posttraumatic stress disorder. They turned to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which listed these warning signs: A person with PTSD &amp;#039;persistently&amp;#039; avoids stimuli associated with the trauma, including avoiding conversations about the trauma, places that stimulate recollections about the trauma; and they experience a numbing of general responsiveness, such as a &amp;quot;restricted range of affect (e.g., unable to have loving feelings),&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;the feeling of detachment or estrangement from others.&amp;quot; Ibid. Finally, an individual with PTSD has &amp;quot;persistent symptoms of increased arousal,&amp;quot; as evidenced by &amp;quot;irritability or outbursts of anger,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;hypervigilance,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;exaggerated startle response,&amp;quot; and difficulty sleeping or concentrating. Ibid.  When I first read these passages, they set off a dark memory. Once, I interviewed the head of the Latin King street gang. He was a stone killer who had ordered a man to chop off another man&amp;#039;s head, and when I read his file I thought he deserved what he got and was glad he was in prison. But when I met him, chained to a table in a Supermax prison where he had spent the last 10 years or locked up alone in a tiny cell for 23 hours of the day, his eyes were twitching and he definitely had a &amp;quot;restricted range of affect&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;hypervigilance&amp;quot; and an &amp;quot;exaggerated startle response.&amp;quot; I left ashamed for myself, the guards, the country. A few years later, I got my own taste of solitary. Arrested while covering an animal rights protest for Esquire, I was taken to federal prison. The intake guard asked me if I had any reason to be afraid of being put in the general population and I said, &amp;quot;Hell yes, I&amp;#039;ve seen Oz.&amp;quot; So he put me in solitary. Next came a series of events we&amp;#039;ve all seen in the movies \u2014 they make you strip and squat and spread your cheeks and they put you in a coarse orange jumpsuit and cuff your wrists behind your back. They lead you down a cinder block hall past metal doors and cells where men lie on their bunks with towels over their faces to block the light, an eerie sight that makes you feel like you&amp;#039;re in a vast coroner&amp;#039;s lab. They push you into the cell and close the heavy clanging door and tell you to back up and put your wrists through the slot. They uncuff you in a bitter parody of freedom.  But all that&amp;#039;s on the outside. The real impact is in your mind. There&amp;#039;s no natural light, no clocks, nothing but cinder block walls and a metal toilet. You have no idea when you&amp;#039;re going to get out or even if you&amp;#039;re going to get out, because we all know things happen in prison. So there isn&amp;#039;t even a feeling of the movement of time. The minutes don&amp;#039;t crawl by, they crawl in circles. The sick feeling that you fucked up big time sweeps over you in waves. &amp;quot;Like being buried alive&amp;quot; is the phrase that leaps to mind. I can&amp;#039;t imagine doing that for a week or a month, much less years. But this has become the daily life of about 36,000 Americans in federal and state prisons, as this recent report by the Guggenheim foundation details: In theory, supermaxes were established as prisons within prisons or as separate prisons to house &amp;quot;the worst of the worst,&amp;quot; the most violent prisoners. But their unforgiving conditions have become standard punishment for inmates who break prison rules, and prisoners say solitary confinement often is used to force inmates to &amp;quot;rat&amp;quot; on each other. Prisoners with mental illness are often relegated to them because they have a hard time following the rules. Some studies show the prevalence of mental illness among supermax inmates to be 50 percent or higher. As a result of all this, spurred by the obvious connection to Guant\u00E1namo and Abu Ghraib and alerted by an influential expose in the New Yorker by Atul Guwande, more and more religious and human rights groups are coming together to fight the Supermax explosion and the abuse of solitary confinement. They include the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, which links 280 religious groups all over America, Physicians for Human Rights, the American Civil Liberties Union, Human Rights Watch, and the American Friends Service Committee. One leading scholar of prison psychiatric conditions \u2014 Dr. Jeffrey Metzner of the University of Colorado medical school \u2014 has even called on prison doctors to raise moral objections with wardens and risk their jobs by going public if nothing is done. The problem is even starting to have international implications: 1. In 2006 the UN Committee Against Torture expressed its concern about the &amp;quot;prolonged isolation periods&amp;quot; in American supermaxes and &amp;quot;the effect such treatment has on [inmates&amp;#039;] mental health, and that its purpose may be retribution, in which case it would constitute cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.&amp;quot; 2. In 2008 the U.N. special rapporteur on torture, Manfred Nowak, recommended that solitary confinement &amp;quot;should be kept to a minimum, used in very exceptional cases, for as short a time as possible, and only as a last resort&amp;quot; \u2014 all conditions violated by U.S. supermaxes. 3. According to David Fathi, head of the ACLU&amp;#039;s prison project, the prolonged isolation imposed in supermax prisons &amp;quot;may well violate [U.S.] treaty obligations.&amp;quot; PHR&amp;#039;s Raymond said flatly: &amp;quot;Solitary confinement is definitely recognized internationally as torture.&amp;quot; All of this came to a head in Maine in the last few months in the first big attempt launched by reformers to pass a law to limit the use of solitary confinement. But groups like The American Psychiatric Association and the National Commission on Correctional Health Care avoided taking a stand, and the Maine Department of Corrections said its prisoners weren&amp;#039;t really in solitary because they are &amp;quot;taken from their cells to have several showers a week and had other minimal human contact.&amp;quot; In the end the Maine legislature, worried about the cost of building a new prison psychiatric hospital to treat all the mentally ill prisoners currently thrown in solitary as a way to control their behavior, voted against the bill. So this fight has just begun, and anyone concerned about the decency and the soul of America should offer their support to groups like the ACLU, the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, Physicians for Human Rights, Human Rights Watch, and the American Friends Service Committee. Because it&amp;#039;s absurd to worry about what we did to suspected terrorists in the wake of a terrible attack while ignoring what we do to our own citizens every day. The last word goes to Janis Petzel, president of the Maine Association of Psychiatric Physicians: &amp;quot;Twenty years ahead, I don&amp;#039;t want to look back and say we were like the Nazi doctors.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a7532/torture-in-the-us-052610/>