Yesterday, Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com wrote about the inhuman conditions of Bradley Manning’s Detention asking whether being put in solitary is torture. Greenwald provided evidence that it is. Of course Julian Assange is also currently in solitary, allowed out for a walk with four guards for a few minutes a day.
My grandmother was a survivor of Changi Torture in WWII. She spent a month in a small room at the Singapore YMCA with 17 men who were insane with pain and starvation and sleep deprivation (giving up half her daily handful of rice to the starving men) and then 7 months in solitary and she certainly thought the solitary confinement was worse than than being with the abused and miserable men.
Here’s a little bit from by play, looking for Mrs. Peel Scene Forty-Nine: Cell Outram
SOUND: None
Dorothy: Oh, the screams. The screams. I shall go mad. Why won’t they go away. Why can’t I be back at the YMCA with my friends. What day is it? I must keep track. I must find something to do. Why won’t they give me a book to read? I’ll write a novel in my head. To keep me busy. I’ll make it a love story…”Susan North gasped as she walked out of the YMCA building into the sunlight.
The entire play is at www.tighsolas.ca/page745.html.
At the war crimes trial they prosecutors pooh poohed her solitary confinement, and suggested the worst thing that happened to her was having to go to the bathroom in front of the men. Propriety, Propriety.
