Over the weekend, Andrew Sullivan thought it important to remind his readers that John Walker Lindh, the American Taliban, was “the first victim of torture.” He quoted Tom Junod, from Esquire:

John Walker Lindh was blindfolded and duct-taped naked to a stretcher in Afghanistan. He was being held in a shipping container, and he had a bullet in his thigh, and by the time an FBI agent interrogated him, the bullet had been in his thigh for nearly two weeks and the wound was starting to stink. “Of course, there are no lawyers here,” the agent told him, and two days after he gave his statement, he was moved to a ship in the Arabian Sea and the bullet was finally extracted.

Last I checked the Navy doctor treating Lindh slept “on a concrete floor in a sleeping bag in a room with a hole in the wall and a hole in the ceiling,” and gave his patient the container to protect him from the elements.

In any case, what I find interesting is how context-dependent the Left’s outrage is. An American who denounced his country and took up arms alongside a barbaric group of misogynist extremists went a week in a stretcher before a doctor properly treated him, and that’s called torture. Subject the entire tax-paying American population to the same circumstance and it’s called the healthcare we owe one-another as human beings.