Today's Austin American Statesman ran an AP story (actually more of a press release disguised as a news story from the left wing activist group Human Rights Watch) with this inflamatory headline, "Group: U.S. tortured detainees in secret." The story is located at http://www.statesman.com/news/content/shared- gen/ap/Asia/Afghan_Secret_Prison.html. The press release, excuse me, AP story starts off, "The United States operated a secret prison in Afghanistan as recently as last year, torturing detainees with sleep deprivation, chaining them to the walls and forcing them to listen to loud music in total darkness for days, a human rights group alleged Monday." The most dramatic example of "torture" in the article reads, "'They were chained to walls, deprived of food and drinking water, and kept in total darkness with loud rap, heavy metal music, or other sounds blared for weeks at a time, the report said. 'Some detainees said they were shackled in a manner that made it impossible to lie down or sleep, with restraints that caused their hands and wrists to swell up or bruise.'" Now I dislike rap and heavy metal as much as any al Qaeda terrorist, but I never realized that rap music is understood to be a form of torture. A few weeks back, my wife was watching the MTV Music awards with the volume up loud. It was pretty much all rap for several hours. I found it to be extremely annoying, but until today I didn't realize that my wife was actually subjecting me to torture! And just this morning she woke me up at 2AM to get on the computer and sign her up for a 6AM flight. I couldn't get back to sleep and then I took her to the airport at 4:15 AM. I am sleep deprived as I type and I realize yet again that I have been subjected to torture by my wife. The woman I love! Seriously, I think the mainstream media is making a dangerous alliance with international America-bashers in re-defining the word "terrorism". If sleep deprivation and subjecting captives to rap music are forms of "torture", then we have reached the point where incarceration itself could be considered torture. And therefore we have also reached the point that the MSM should simply be ignored when it throws the word "torture" around. GREGG