McCain’s elastic principles

Editorial
St. Petersburg Times
February 16, 2008

It turns out that Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, isn’t quite as principled as it first appeared on the issue of torture. He joined with the majority of his fellow Senate Republicans on Wednesday to oppose legislation that would rein in abusive prisoner interrogations by the CIA.

McCain, who was tortured as a POW in Vietnam, has been an eloquent advocate for a ban on the cruel treatment of detainees, even opposing President Bush and other members of his own party to stake out a humane position. But McCain muddled his position Wednesday with his vote siding with a president who defends the use of torture.

The highly partisan 51-45 Senate vote was on the intelligence authorization bill. It contained a provision that held the CIA to the 19 noncoercive interrogation techniques found in the Army Field Manual. President Bush has promised to veto the measure as a result.

Experts in wartime interrogation say that the techniques outlined in the Field Manual are by far the best means of successfully extracting actionable intelligence. They say that using brutality such as waterboarding, exposing a prisoner to hypothermia and severe sleep deprivation - some of the techniques the U.S. has reportedly used - only impede getting at the truth, since the prisoner will often say anything to end the abuse.

Until Wednesday, this is the view that McCain appeared to hold.

To the contrary, McCain now says. In a statement explaining his vote against the legislation, McCain argued that “what we need is not to tie the CIA to the Army Field Manual, but rather to have a good-faith interpretation of the statutes that guide what is permissible in the CIA program.”

Interesting, since that was not the view he expressed during the Republican presidential primary debate in St. Petersburg in November. At that time, McCain couldn’t have been clearer that he thought the Army Field Manual was all that was needed for effective interrogations:

“Life is not 24and Jack Bauer,” McCain emotionally asserted. “Life is interrogation techniques which are humane and yet effective. And I just came back from visiting a prison in Iraq. The Army general there said that techniques under the Army Field Manual are working and working effectively, and he didn’t think they need to do anything else.”

He offered no addendum for the CIA suggesting that it needs a freer hand.

McCain also has answered “yes” when asked if he deemed the Bush administration’s enhanced interrogation techniques as torture.

Congress has done this nation a great service by passing a bill to end the CIA’s program of abusive interrogations. But Bush’s threatened veto, coupled with the unwillingness of enough Republican senators to join with Democrats for an override, means that we will have to wait until the next president takes office for the federal government to reclaim its moral authority.

If that president happens to be McCain, he should remember when he stood as the conscience of the Senate in condemning torture.

McCain seems to shift right in terror debate

Aligns with Bush on two key votes

By Charlie Savage
Boston Globe
February 16, 2008

Senator John McCain, who has long distanced himself from the Bush administration on legal issues involving the war on terrorism, this week aligned himself with conservative supporters of the White House on key votes related to the interrogation of prisoners and warrantless surveillance.

Though McCain supporters defended his votes as consistent with his past positions, both appeared to represent a move to the right on issues in which the senator has been at odds with his party’s conservative wing.

David Golove, a New York University law professor who studies executive power, said McCain seems to be changing his views in order to “consolidate support among the most conservative parts of the Republican Party, who generally have been sympathetic to the kinds of activities undertaken by President Bush that had made Senator McCain extremely uncomfortable.”

On Wednesday, McCain voted against a bill restricting CIA interrogators to the techniques approved in the Army Field Manual, which complies with the Geneva Conventions. McCain - who has consistently argued that the administration was wrong to insist that Bush’s wartime powers allow him to employ controversial tactics despite antitorture laws and treaties - issued a statement arguing that the CIA needed more flexibility to extract information from terror suspects.

Ever since the Abu Ghraib torture scandal came to light in 2004, McCain has been the most outspoken Republican voice against such interrogation tactics. In 2005, McCain pushed a ban on “cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment” through Congress despite Bush’s opposition. And while he has never said the CIA’s interrogation techniques should be confined to those in the Army Field Manual, he has lauded the manual as effective and repeatedly declared that the United States should treat detainees humanely because “it’s not about who they are, it’s about who we are.”

Moreover, McCain voted Tuesday to terminate lawsuits against telecommunications companies that participated in Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program. Passage of the bill would force courts to toss out some 40 cases in which critics of the program are trying to get a judge to rule that their participation was illegal.

In that respect McCain’s vote runs counter to his previous criticism of the program. After the program came to light in 2005, McCain criticized Bush for not coming to Congress to change the law requiring warrants. And in an interview with the Globe about presidential power in December, McCain said he did not believe that presidents have the power to authorize surveillance programs that bypass statutes, saying: “I don’t think the president has the right to disobey any law.”

Said Golove, “He’s willing to compromise on long-held positions that he’s taken, which are positions that have great moral considerations that stand behind them, apparently out of concern about political consequences.”

In a lengthy statement McCain filed into the Congressional Record this week, the senator defended himself against any suggestion that he had flip-flopped on his opposition to torture.

McCain said that he still opposes the use of cruel tactics, but that he has never supported limiting the CIA to only those techniques specifically listed in the Army Field Manual.

The senator also explained that he believes that one controversial technique the CIA has sometimes used - waterboarding, which McCain described as “mock execution by inducing the misperception of drowning,” and which the Army Field Manual bans - is illegal under existing law. But, he said, the CIA still needs to be able to use other “alternative interrogation techniques” beyond those that are “publicly listed and formulated for military use.”

“What we need is not to tie the CIA to the Army Field Manual, but rather to have a good faith interpretation of the statutes that guide what is permissible in the CIA program,” McCain said.

But critics said McCain’s explanation was disingenuous because he knows the administration has interpreted existing antitorture laws as allowing a host of harsh techniques.

In recent days, Justice Department officials have also refused to say whether waterboarding is illegal under a 2006 law, saying only that the CIA is not currently using the tactic.

Elissa Massamino, the Washington director of Human Rights First, called McCain’s vote this week “devastating” because the senator has been “the person with the highest profile and the greatest standing on this issue in the Senate.”

“His argument seems to be that we’ve told the administration that it needs to obey the law and what needs to happen here is a good-faith interpretation of the law, but all evidence suggests that that has not happened from day one and there is no reason to believe it will happen now,” she said.

In addition to waterboarding, other interrogation techniques used by the CIA have reportedly included shackling prisoners into painful stress positions, forced nudity, prolonged isolation, sleep deprivation, subjection to temperature extremes, and bombardment with loud noises and bright lights for lengthy periods.

McCain did not explain his vote to give retroactive immunity to the telecommunications companies, and neither the McCain campaign nor his Senate office responded to questions about the issue. Supporters of the measure have argued that private companies should not be punished for agreeing to the administration’s request for their help after the 2001 terrorist attacks.

The senator followed his vote by bashing the House of Representatives as “disgraceful” for not immediately passing the same bill the Senate had just approved.

By contrast, the two remaining Democratic presidential candidates, Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, both opposed the bill.

McCain’s performance won plaudits from conservatives. Former prosecutor Andy McCarthy, writing in National Review online, an influential conservative blogsite that has often been very critical of McCain, said the surveillance vote showed why the Arizona senator should be the next president.

“It showed about as starkly as it can be shown that when it comes to [picking the candidate] who understands the threat we are facing and who is more fit to be trusted with responsibility for protecting American lives, there is no comparison here: McCain is so head-and-shoulders above Obama and Clinton, it’s hard to quantify,” he wrote.

McCain: Against torture, but

By Andrew Sullivan
The Altantic
February 14, 2008

I’m heartbroken. Torture is illegal and immoral whether it is conducted by the military or the CIA. That was McCain’s original position. It appears it is no longer. Marty Lederman homes in on the key point:

Senator McCain rightly insists that the U.S. may not (i) torture; (ii) engage in cruel treatment prohibited by Common Article 3; or (iii) engage in conduct that shocks the conscience, under the McCain Amendment. He also insists that waterboarding violates each of these legal restrictions, that the Bush Administration’s legal analysis has been dishonest and flatly wrong, and that we need “a good faith interpretation of the statutes that guide what is permissible in the CIA program.”

The Feinstein Amendment would have accomplished all of these objectives, but Senator McCain voted against it, presumably because he wishes that the CIA be permitted to continue the use of other of its enhanced techniques, apart from waterboarding. Those techniques are reported to include stress positions, hypothermia, threats to the detainee and his family, severe sleep deprivation, and severe sensory deprivation. Senator McCain has not explained which of these he thinks are not torture and cruel treatment, nor which he would wish to preserve for use by the CIA. But if the President does as he has promised and follows Senator McCain’s lead by vetoing this bill, the CIA will continue to assert the right to use all of these techniques — and possibly waterboarding, as well.

This is why the focus on waterboarding has been necessary but distracting. It has allowed people to believe that this relatively rare technique is the beginning and end of the Bush-Cheney torture regime. It isn’t. It’s a fraction of the illegal abuse that they have condoned and believe in. I simply cannot see any explanation for this except politics - that McCain feels the need to appease the Republican far right at this point in time, and, tragically, the right to torture has now become a litmus test of “conservative” orthodoxy. It’s a Karl Rove wedge issue of a classic kind: using the crudest of emotional appeals to gin up populist authoritarianism for the sake of Republican partisan advantage in wartime. There is nothing conservative about torture, of course. But the authoritarians of the far right are hardly conservatives in the traditional sense either.

So McCain reveals himself as a positioner even on the subject on which he has gained a reputation for unimpeachable integrity. It’s worth reading Jon Chait’s illuminating new piece in this context. I repeat that I am heartbroken. McCain has indeed been a leader in preventing the military from torturing terror suspects, and in banning waterboarding. But by leaving this lacuna in the law, he gives this president the space he wants. As president himself, of course, McCain would surely instruct the CIA to uphold the American way of interrogation, and not to adopt techniques once used by the Gestapo and prosecuted by the US as war crimes. But we now know that there will be one difference between Obama and McCain in November. One will never tolerate torture; the other just did.

McCain’s full statement is after the jump:

Mr. President, I oppose passage of the Intelligence Authorization Conference Report in its current form.

During conference proceedings, conferees voted by a narrow margin to include a provision that would apply the Army Field Manual to the interrogation activities of the Central Intelligence Agency. The sponsors of that provision have stated that their goal is to ensure that detainees under American control are not subject to torture. I strongly share this goal, and believe that only by ensuring that the United States adheres to our international obligations and our deepest values can we maintain the moral credibility that is our greatest asset in the war on terror.

That is why I fought for passage of the Detainee Treatment Act (DTA), which applied the Army Field Manual on interrogation to all military detainees and barred cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of any detainee held by any agency. In 2006, I insisted that the Military Commissions Act (MCA) preserve the undiluted protections of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions for our personnel in the field. And I have expressed repeatedly my view that the controversial technique known as “waterboarding” constitutes nothing less than illegal torture.

Throughout these debates, I have said that it was not my intent to eliminate the CIA interrogation program, but rather to ensure that the techniques it employs are humane and do not include such extreme techniques as waterboarding. I said on the Senate floor during the debate over the Military Commissions Act, “Let me state this flatly: it was never our purpose to prevent the CIA from detaining and interrogating terrorists. On the contrary, it is important to the war on terror that the CIA have the ability to do so. At the same time, the CIA’s interrogation program has to abide by the rules, including the standards of the Detainee Treatment Act.” This remains my view today.

When, in 2005, the Congress voted to apply the Field Manual to the Department of Defense, it deliberately excluded the CIA. The Field Manual, a public document written for military use, is not always directly translatable to use by intelligence officers. In view of this, the legislation allowed the CIA to retain the capacity to employ alternative interrogation techniques. I’d emphasize that the DTA permits the CIA to use different techniques than the military employs, but that it is not intended to permit the CIA to use unduly coercive techniques – indeed, the same act prohibits the use of any cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment.

Similarly, as I stated after passage of the Military Commissions Act in 2006, nothing contained in that bill would require the closure of the CIA’s detainee program; the only requirement was that any such program be in accordance with law and our treaty obligations, including Geneva Common Article 3.

The conference report would go beyond any of the recent laws that I just mentioned – laws that were extensively debated and considered – by bringing the CIA under the Army Field Manual, extinguishing thereby the ability of that agency to employ any interrogation technique beyond those publicly listed and formulated for military use. I cannot support such a step because I have not been convinced that the Congress erred by deliberately excluding the CIA. I believe that our energies are better directed at ensuring that all techniques, whether used by the military or the CIA, are in full compliance with our international obligations and in accordance with our deepest values. What we need is not to tie the CIA to the Army Field Manual, but rather to have a good faith interpretation of the statutes that guide what is permissible in the CIA program.

This necessarily brings us to the question of waterboarding. Administration officials have stated in recent days that this technique is no longer in use, but they have declined to say that it is illegal under current law. I believe that it is clearly illegal and that we should publicly recognize this fact.

In assessing the legality of waterboarding, the Administration has chosen to apply a “shocks the conscience” analysis to its interpretation of the DTA. I stated during the passage of that law that a fair reading of the prohibition on cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment outlaws waterboarding and other extreme techniques. It is, or should be, beyond dispute that waterboarding “shocks the conscience.”

It is also incontestable that waterboarding is outlawed by the Military Commissions Act, and it was the clear intent of Congress to prohibit the practice. The MCA enumerates grave breaches of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions that constitute offenses under the War Crimes Act. Among these is an explicit prohibition on acts that inflict “serious and non-transitory mental harm,” which the MCA states “need not be prolonged.” Staging a mock execution by inducing the misperception of drowning is a clear violation of this standard. Indeed, during the negotiations, we were personally assured by Administration officials that this language, which applies to all agencies of the U.S. Government, prohibited waterboarding.

It is unfortunate that the reluctance of officials to stand by this straightforward conclusion has produced in the Congress such frustration that we are today debating whether to apply a military field manual to non-military intelligence activities. It would be far better, I believe, for the Administration to state forthrightly what is clear in current law – that anyone who engages in waterboarding, on behalf of any U.S. government agency, puts himself at risk of criminal prosecution and civil liability.

We have come a long way in the fight against violent extremists, and the road to victory will be longer still. I support a robust offensive to wage and prevail in this struggle. But as we confront those committed to our destruction, it is vital that we never forget that we are, first and foremost, Americans. The laws and values that have built our nation are a source of strength, not weakness, and we will win the war on terror not in spite of devotion to our cherished values, but because we have held fast to them.

Vote against waterboarding bill called consistent

By Dan Eggen and Michael D. Shear
Washington Post
February 16, 2008

On Wednesday, John McCain voted against a waterboarding bill that applied Army standards to the CIA. Yesterday, the Arizona senator addressed a town hall meeting in Oshkosh, Wis.

On Wednesday, John McCain voted against a waterboarding bill that applied Army standards to the CIA. Yesterday, the Arizona senator addressed a town hall meeting in Oshkosh, Wis. (By Gerald Herbert — Associated Press)

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But later the same day, McCain cast a vote against Democratic-sponsored legislation supported by anti-torture advocates that sought to ban waterboarding and other coercive tactics by the CIA.

The Senate vote put McCain (R-Ariz.) on the same side as President Bush, who plans to veto the waterboarding ban. It also was consistent, his spokesman said, with statements McCain has made on the subject since 2005.

But several Democrats referred to the vote as an opportunity to undermine his image as a straight-talking opponent of harsh detainee treatment and as a former prisoner of war unafraid of challenging the administration on points of principle.

“He’s in a precarious spot and is trying to shore up his base,” said Stacie Paxton, press secretary for the Democratic National Committee. “This shows he will put his principles on hold in order to get the nomination.”

McCain and his campaign aides bristle at such allegations, saying that his opposition to waterboarding has not wavered and that his vote was consistent with his assertion that the interrogation technique is illegal.

McCain’s vote put him in the Senate minority with 44 others. A total of 51 senators voted for the measure, which would force the CIA to follow the rules in the Army’s field manual for interrogations. The two leading Democratic presidential candidates, Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) and Barack Obama (Ill.), have said waterboarding is clearly illegal and should be banned, but neither voted on the Senate legislation because they were campaigning elsewhere.

Randy Scheunemann, McCain’s top national security adviser, said McCain was concerned about the Senate legislation’s requirement that the CIA abide by Army rules. “It’s not a vote for torture,” Scheunemann said. “This wasn’t a vote on waterboarding. This was a vote on applying the standards of the field manual to CIA personnel.”

The Army manual specifically bars waterboarding and seven other tactics: forcing a detainee to be naked, perform sexual acts or pose sexually; placing hoods or sacks over the head of a detainee; beatings, electric shock, burns or other forms of physical pain; threatening detainees with dogs; the use of temperature extremes to cause physical trauma; mock executions; and depriving detainees of necessary food, water or medical care.

A McCain Senate aide said that his vote does not mean the senator endorses any of these tactics. Instead, the aide said, there are noncoercive interrogation techniques not used by the Army that could be useful to the CIA. The aide declined to provide an example, but said it made sense for the CIA to use tactics that are not widely known through the field manual, which is a public document.

McCain was a Navy pilot who spent five years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam after being shot down. His story of enduring brutal torture at the hands of his captors is well-known, and he has spoken forcefully on Capitol Hill against torture and cruel and inhuman treatment of prisoners.

In 2005, he sponsored the Detainee Treatment Act, which explicitly forbade the use of waterboarding and other harsh tactics on U.S. military prisoners but exempted the CIA. During the first GOP presidential debate last May, McCain defended the limited interrogation tactics used by the military. “We have procedures for interrogation in the Army Field Manual,” he said. “Those, I think, would be adequate in 999,999 of [1 million] cases, and I think that if we agree to torture people, we will do ourselves great harm in the world.” In November, McCain scolded then-candidate Mitt Romney for supporting the use of waterboarding.

The vote came a week after the CIA publicly confirmed for the first time its use of waterboarding. CIA policy now forbids waterboarding, but the Bush administration opposes efforts to explicitly outlaw its use.

Scheunemann said McCain’s vote Wednesday was “100 percent consistent” with statements he has made on the subject since 2005. “It’s easily explainable and easily understood by the American people,” he added.

McCain’s vote prompted disappointment among civil liberties and human rights advocates, who have frequently been allied with McCain on detention and interrogation issues. “It’s not as if the Bush administration has given us any new reason to trust them on this issue,” said Elisa Massimino, Washington director for Human Rights First. “The only thing that seems to have changed is that an election is looming closer.”

Tom Malinowski, Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch, said McCain appears to have concluded “that he just doesn’t want a fight with the president right now on this issue, or any issue, given his political difficulties with the right.” Malinowski added, however, that “in the long run, he always suffers politically when he doesn’t appear to be acting consistent with his principles.”

Alex Vogel, a GOP consultant not affiliated with any presidential campaign this year, said Senate Democrats had tried to engineer a vote that would put McCain in a box. McCain “can look everyone in the eye and say, ‘I know torture. How dare you accuse me of playing politics with this?’ ” Vogel said. “That’s a winner for John McCain.”

McCain drops the torture ball

By Derrick. Z. Jackson
Boston Globe
February 16, 2008

John McCain this week had a choice between his principles and propping up a failed president. He chose the latter.

The Senate joined the House in passing an intelligence bill that would ban the CIA from using waterboarding as an interrogation tactic. The CIA would have to abide by the Army Field Manual, which also prohibits beatings, electric or temperature shocks, forced nudity, mock executions, and the use of dogs. Some of those abusive techniques were on global display in the torture photos from Abu Ghraib.

McCain, a Vietnam prisoner of war, has long condemned waterboarding as torture, making him more sensitive than President Bush on an issue that stained America’s image. But the Arizona senator and virtual Republican nominee to replace Bush voted against the bill. Bush says he will veto the measure.

McCain said that while he remains opposed to waterboarding, “We always supported allowing the CIA to use extra measures.”

Extra measures? Then what are rules for?

This comes a week after the CIA admitted waterboarding three 9/11 suspects in 2002 and 2003. The CIA says it no longer uses the practice, and this week, Steven Bradbury, acting head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, said, “The program as it is authorized today does not include waterboarding.”

But the macabre White House maintains that while it is not currently employing waterboarding, it has the right to keep it in its arsenal of tactics. White House press secretary Dana Perino said this week, “We are not going to talk about what may or may not be lawful in the future.” In a partisan shot across the bow, Perino was quoted by the Associated Press as saying Americans will “have to ask themselves, ‘Do you trust the intelligence community more than you trust Democrats who are beholden to their left wing?’ “

Americans already answered the question in a November CNN poll, with 69 percent saying waterboarding is torture and 58 percent saying the government should not use it against terrorists. Are all those Americans beholden to the left wing?

This runs roughly parallel to America’s larger rejection of Bush’s war in Iraq, which McCain has chosen to stand behind. In a January NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, 67 percent of respondents disapproved of the way Bush is handling Iraq and 59 percent said the American casualties were not worth the cost or removing Saddam Hussein. In a February CNN poll, 64 percent of Americans opposed the war in Iraq. Sixty-three percent of respondents told the Los Angeles Times last month that they want our troops out either now or within a year.

McCain has often tried to position himself as someone who would conduct the war with more savvy. From time to time he has criticized the Bush strategy, including saying he had “no confidence” in the disgraced former defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. During his 2004 Democratic bid for the presidency, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts suggested that McCain would be a solid replacement for Rumsfeld.

But at a campaign stop in New Hampshire last month, a man said to McCain, “President Bush has talked about our staying in Iraq for 50 years.” McCain chimed in, “Maybe 100.” McCain added, “We’ve been in Japan for 60 years, we’ve been in South Korea for 50 years or so. That’d be fine with me as long as Americans . . . as long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed, then it’s fine with me.”

The charitable view of this is that McCain is talking benignly of a military-police-of-the-world type of role for American troops. There are not many people in the streets complaining about our bases in Germany. But those bases were established after a “good war.” Iraq is an invasion and occupation built on falsehoods, if not lies. It took a while, but Americans have figured this out.

McCain seems to have not. Asked last month on “Meet the Press” whether he would have still invaded Iraq based on what we know now, McCain said, “The invasion was not a mistake. The handling of the war was a terrible mistake.”

That equivocation is a bad sign. For all of McCain’s sanity about some of the mistakes, it also must be remembered that he was no different than Vice President Dick Cheney at the start of the invasion, telling NBC, “the Iraqi people will greet us as liberators.”

How McCain wins the White House as an echo of Cheney is anybody’s guess.

Did McCain flip-flop on torture?

By Jake Tapper
ABC News
February 15, 2008

This week, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., voted against an intelligence bill that stated:

“No individual in the custody or under the effective control of an element of the intelligence community or instrumentality thereof, regardless of nationality or physical location, shall be subject to any treatment or technique of interrogation not authorized by the United States Army Field Manual on Human Intelligence Collector Operations.”

Andrew Sullivan, who has written admiringly of McCain’s anti-torture position in the past, describes himself as “heartbroken.”

“I simply cannot see any explanation for this except politics - that McCain feels the need to appease the Republican far right at this point in time,…McCain has indeed been a leader in preventing the military from torturing terror suspects, and in banning waterboarding. But by leaving this lacuna in the law, he gives this president the space he wants. As president himself, of course, McCain would surely instruct the CIA to uphold the American way of interrogation, and not to adopt techniques once used by the Gestapo and prosecuted by the US as war crimes. But we now know that there will be one difference between Obama and McCain in November. One will never tolerate torture; the other just did.”

McCain insists that he remains opposed to torture and waterboarding, but that this bill would have applied military standards to the CIA, which he opposes. As McCain said on the Senate floor:

“It was not my intent to eliminate the CIA interrogation program, but rather to ensure that the techniques it employs are humane and do not include such extreme techniques as waterboarding. I said on the Senate floor during the debate over the Military Commissions Act, ‘Let me state this flatly: it was never our purpose to prevent the CIA from detaining and interrogating terrorists. On the contrary, it is important to the war on terror that the CIA have the ability to do so. At the same time, the CIA’s interrogation program has to abide by the rules, including the standards of the Detainee Treatment Act.’”

McCain argued that when the Congress voted to apply the Army “Field Manual to the Department of Defense, it deliberately excluded the CIA. The Field Manual, a public document written for military use, is not always directly translatable to use by intelligence officers. In view of this, the legislation allowed the CIA to retain the capacity to employ alternative interrogation techniques. I’d emphasize that the DTA permits the CIA to use different techniques than the military employs, but that it is not intended to permit the CIA to use unduly coercive techniques

indeed, the same act prohibits the use of any cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment.”

“What we need is not to tie the CIA to the Army Field Manual, ” McCain said, “but rather to have a good faith interpretation of the statutes that guide what is permissible in the CIA program.”

Lots of supporters of the bill, of course, say that the CIA hasn’t proven itself to be interpreting their statutes in “good faith” and thus need this law.

President Bush is going to veto it anyway, as White House spox Dana Perino said in a gaggle yesterday morning, because “it would repeal the entire enhanced interrogation program that this Congress passed on a bipartisan basis in October of 2006. It’s the program that General Hayden has said has saved lives. This is not the President talking, this is the intelligence community…

“Do you trust the intelligence community more than you trust Democrats who are beholden to their left wing?”

What do you make of this all?

John McCain sells his soul to the base

By Mary Shaw
OpEdNews.com
February 17, 2008

I used to hope that John McCain would win the Republican presidential nomination this year, as he is likely to do. Even though McCain wants to keep U.S. troops in Iraq for 100 years, at least he actively opposed torture. So in the horrific event that a Democrat does not win the White House this year, at least we might see an end to the systematic (and illegal) use of torture in our name.

Not any more.

Now the Republican choices are Mike Huckabee, who doesn’t believe in science, and front-runner John McCain, a torture survivor himself, who incomprehensibly has now voted for torture.

On February 13, McCain voted against a bill that would ban the CIA or other American agents from using waterboarding or any other interrogation technique that is not authorized by the Army Field Manual. Fortunately, the bill passed anyway. (Of course, George W. Bush is promising a veto, because he wants to keep torturing people.)

In the process, McCain has again revealed himself to be a sell-out to the cold, cruel Republican base.

What happened to the John McCain who historically worked in a bipartisan way to legislate against torture and other forms of cruel and degrading treatment of detainees?

What happened to the John McCain who demonstrated that torture doesn’t work, by recalling how, when asked under torture in Vietnam to provide his captors with the names of the members of his flight squadron, instead rattled off the names of the Green Bay Packers’ offensive line, “knowing that providing them false information was sufficient to suspend the abuse”?

What happened to the John McCain who was so appalled by the photos from Abu Ghraib that he went on the CBS “Early Show” and called for Abu Ghraib to be razed to the ground because it is a symbol of torture and mistreatment “both from the Saddam Hussein regime and this one”?

What happened to the John McCain who stood up in a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee and grilled Donald Rumsfeld in an effort to get some accountability for the atrocities committed at Abu Ghraib?

That John McCain is gone, and has apparently been replaced by a good, compliant Republican. Endless war. Endless torture. God bless America.

I still hear from people who admire McCain because they believe him to be a moderate Republican. I hope those people will wake up before November. After all, there is nothing moderate about torture.