You know it’s a bad time for America, when the survivors of the Soviet gulags start sharing their jokes with us. Vladimir Bukovsky, who spent 12 years in Soviet prisons, labor camps and ersatz psychiatric hospitals for nonviolent human rights activities, shares us this one in Sunday’s Post …

One nasty morning Comrade Stalin discovered that his favorite pipe was missing. Naturally, he called in his henchman, Lavrenti Beria, and instructed him to find the pipe. A few hours later, Stalin found it in his desk and called off the search. "But, Comrade Stalin," stammered Beria, "five suspects have already confessed to stealing it."

Hahahaha…Get it?

This joke, whispered among those who trusted each other when I was a kid in Moscow in the 1950s, is perhaps the best contribution I can make to the current argument in Washington about legislation banning torture and inhumane treatment of suspected terrorists captured abroad. Now that President Bush has made a public show of endorsing Sen. John McCain’s amendment, it would seem that the debate is ending. But that the debate occurred at all, and that prominent figures are willing to entertain the idea, is perplexing and alarming to me. I have seen what happens to a society that becomes enamored of such methods in its quest for greater security; it takes more than words and political compromise to beat back the impulse.

Kinda makes you wonder why we fought the cold war anyway, if only to eventually become what the Soviet Union was, if not in principle then in practice. You can call a nation whose single party rule decrees that anyone, even its own citizens can be arrested, imprisoned and tortured on the sole say-so of the party leader a lot of things, but a civilized nation isn’t one of them.

But behold George Bush’s America. Remember when republicans were always bellyaching about liberals and "big brother" government? Well…it all turned out to be just a lot of empty rhetoric didn’t it? Look at what they’ve turned America into in just six short years of total control of the federal government.

Even talking about the possibility of using CID treatment sends wrong signals and encourages base instincts in those who should be consistently delivered from temptation by their superiors. As someone who has been on the receiving end of the "treatment" under discussion, let me tell you that trying to make a distinction between torture and CID techniques is ridiculous. Long gone are the days when a torturer needed the nasty-looking tools displayed in the Tower of London. A simple prison bed is deadly if you remove the mattress and force a prisoner to sleep on the iron frame night after night after night. Or how about the "Chekist’s handshake" so widely practiced under Stalin — a firm squeeze of the victim’s palm with a simple pencil inserted between his fingers? Very convenient, very simple. And how would you define leaving 2,000 inmates of a labor camp without dental service for months on end? Is it CID not to treat an excruciatingly painful toothache, or is it torture?

Now it appears that sleep deprivation is "only" CID and used on Guantanamo Bay captives. Well, congratulations, comrades! It was exactly this method that the NKVD used to produce those spectacular confessions in Stalin’s "show trials" of the 1930s. The henchmen called it "conveyer," when a prisoner was interrogated nonstop for a week or 10 days without a wink of sleep. At the end, the victim would sign any confession without even understanding what he had signed.

Vladimir Bukovsky speaks from first hand experience here. Listen to him. This is our future if the republicans can get away with this.

In 1971, while in Lefortovo prison in Moscow (the central KGB interrogation jail), I went on a hunger strike demanding a defense lawyer of my choice (the KGB wanted its trusted lawyer to be assigned instead). The moment was most inconvenient for my captors because my case was due in court, and they had no time to spare. So, to break me down, they started force-feeding me in a very unusual manner — through my nostrils. About a dozen guards led me from my cell to the medical unit. There they straitjacketed me, tied me to a bed, and sat on my legs so that I would not jerk. The others held my shoulders and my head while a doctor was pushing the feeding tube into my nostril.

Go…now…read this man’s testimony.   

And…You know what…I’m laughing in the faces of everyone who is surprised, let alone shocked at what things have come to now. We all knew who George Bush was long before he dragged America into this sewer. Never mind the gaming of the vote in Florida. Tucker Carlson give us the telling glimpse of the man behind the folksy mask in the premiere issue of the now defunct Talk Magazine, back in the summer of 1999…

In the weeks before the execution, Bush says, Bianca Jagger and a number of other protesters came to Austin to demand clemency for Tucker. "Did you meet with any of them?" I ask. Bush whips around and stares at me. "No, I didn’t meet with any of them," he snaps, as though I’ve just asked the dumbest, most offensive question ever posed. "I didn’t meet with Larry King either when he came down for it. I watched his interview with [Tucker], though. He asked her real difficult questions like, "What would you say to Governor Bush?" "What was her answer?" I wonder.

"Please," Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, "don’t kill me."

I must have look shocked – ridiculing the pleas of a condemned prisoner who has since been executed seems odd and cruel, even for someone as militantly anticrime as Bush – because he immediately stops smirking.

If that’s not stomach churning enough, Carlson also says that the exchange between Tucker and King that Bush mimicked never took place. It’s not the big lies Bush tells that you need to pay attention to…it’s the little needless ones like that. They say it all. This is the man the republicans put into the highest office in our land. This is the man they’ve all been marching in lock step with ever since. Now the republican congress of the United States of America is debating…as though a civilized nation considered such things even debatable…the use of torture, while the whole world watches. Send me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breath free…rooms are still available at Guantanamo Bay, and many other fine locations throughout the American Gulag Archipelago… There isn’t a gutter crawling despot in the world who can’t laugh at us now.

Is there anyone who read Carlson’s article, and who later watched Bush taking the oath of office, who didn’t see this moment coming?