What Michelle Malkin Once Believed Was Torture

A column she wrote four years ago:

The president looked into the audience and singled out Jeremiah Denton, an American pilot shot down by North Vietnamese troops and imprisoned for eight brutal years. He was beaten, starved and thrown into solitary confinement.

In 1966, during a televised propaganda interview with a pro-Commie journalist arranged by his captors, Denton was pressured to condemn American wartime "atrocities." Instead, Denton stood by his country: "(W)hatever the position of my government is, I believe in it, I support it, and I will support it as long as I live." Denton pretended the camera lighting bothered his eyes. With his clueless jailers surrounding him, Denton looked into the lens, blinked his eyes in Morse Code, and covertly broadcast the truth to the world -- Jane Fonda be damned -- by spelling out "T-O-R-T-U-R-E."

The torture Denton endured was very similar to that used against John McCain. He was not waterboarded, and not 183 times. He was forced into stress positions, thrown into solitary, isolated, beaten and had his diet manipulated - all things authorized by George W. Bush. For me, the most telling moment was when president Bush gave his convention speech by satellite for John McCain. Bush had to avoid using the word "torture" to describe what the Vietnamese had once done to McCain. Because if the Vietnamese were torturers, so was Bush.