In a particularly horrific memo released by the Bush administration on their torture practices towards terrorists, they attempted to justify depriving detainees of food as a form of torture.

...The Bush attorney general's office argued that restricting the caloric intake of terrorist suspects to 1000 calories a day was medically safe because people in the United States were dieting along those lines voluntarily.

"While detainees subject to dietary manipulation are obviously situated differently from individuals who voluntarily engage in commercial weight-loss programs, we note that widely available commercial weight-loss programs in the United States employ diets of 1000 kcal/day for sustain periods of weeks or longer without requiring medical supervision," read the footnote.

No! Fail! What?! Read the rest of it here; I particularly enjoyed when they claimed that sleep deprivation causes no long-term mental effects because all psychological side effects disappear once the torture victim goes to sleep.