He has spent more than 29 months in solitary confinement over the past four years, allowed out of his narrow cell during some of that period only to stretch his legs, alone, for one hour a day. In solitary, he has almost no contact with other human beings. He is allowed no radio, no TV and, in a disorienting twist, no watch or calendar to mark the brutal grind of passing time.

With so little stimulation, the brain begins to work against itself. Prisoners in solitary have described delusions, even hallucinations. It can drive a man mad.

"Karma really is a son of a gun!" says Charles Graner, infamous as the torturer of Abu Ghraib….” Salon, 12/1/08

What is it about the sentence, “Torture is wrong and unacceptable” that so many people have trouble grasping?

Yes, driving someone insane through the kind of isolation described above qualifies as torture. If someone kept a dog under similar circumstances, locking it up in a bare room, with no contact with anyone or anything beyond being fed or occasionally sedated and examined by a vet, they’d be denounced as inhumane and filmed being led away in handcuffs on Animal Precint.

So to all you people who denounced Abu Ghraib with such righteous indignation, but are now smirking, and puffing out your little chests, and practicing your Clint Eastwood sneers in the mirror while you jack off to the idea of Charles Graner’s brain being turned to mush –

Don’t kid yourselves. You’re not that much better than he is. And you’d better hope and pray that, as an atheist, I’m right about there being no afterlife, because I have a feeling that if Jesus exists, and he has questions to ask you after you die, “Did you only get off on the torture of bad people” is not going to be one of them.