Reply #23: Have you ever experienced solitary confinement for months and months?

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Your determination that it's not torture isn't a fact. Hell, Bush always said that waterboarding isn't torture, either. So, I guess we'll just keep redefining "torture" until it no longer has any meaning.

“It’s an awful thing, solitary,” John McCain wrote of his five and a half years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam—more than two years of it spent in isolation in a fifteen-by-fifteen-foot cell, unable to communicate with other P.O.W.s except by tap code, secreted notes, or by speaking into an enamel cup pressed against the wall. “It crushes your spirit and weakens your resistance more effectively than any other form of mistreatment.” And this comes from a man who was beaten regularly; denied adequate medical treatment for two broken arms, a broken leg, and chronic dysentery; and tortured to the point of having an arm broken again. A U.S. military study of almost a hundred and fifty naval aviators returned from imprisonment in Vietnam, many of whom were treated even worse than McCain, reported that they found social isolation to be as torturous and agonizing as any physical abuse they suffered.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/30/090330fa_fact_gawande#ixzz1JG96Qnab