John McCain was against torture before he was for it

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

The McMedia idolize Senator John McCain partly because of his experience as a prisoner of war during the Vietnam war. McCain was savagely beaten and tortured, and was broken to the point where he signed confessions and participated in propaganda videos for the North Vietnamese.

John McCain knows the horrors of torture, and he knows that it doesn't produce credible intelligence. His own recounting of his experiences as a prisoner of war is a first-hand account that a tortured prisoner will tell his torturers anything they want to hear just to make the torture stop.

The McMedia, almost none of whom have ever served in the military, idolize McCain because they know that they never could have endured the experiences McCain endured as a prisoner of war. They afford McCain a degree of respect out of their own sense of inadequacy. McCain's own experience with torture elevated him in the eyes of the McMedia to being the preeminent expert on torture.

To his credit, McCain did take the lead in sponsoring an anti-torture amendment to the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 in the U.S. Senate, which was opposed by the Bush White House:

The amendment was introduced to the Senate by Senator John McCain (R- Arizona) on October 3, 2005 as S.Amdt.1977.

The amendment was co-sponsored by Senators Lindsey Graham, Chuck Hagel, Gordon H. Smith, Susan M. Collins, Lamar Alexander, Richard Durbin, Carl Levin, John Warner, Lincoln Chafee, John E. Sununu, and Ken Salazar.

On October 5, 2005 the United States Senate voted 90-9 to support the amendment.

Detainee Treatment Act

But this is where credit due comes to an abrupt end. George W. Bush eviscerated McCain's anti-torture amendment from the Detainee Treatment Act with a signing statement that exempted the executive branch from the reach of the amendment. It said:

"The executive branch shall construe Title X in Division A of the Act, relating to detainees, in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President to supervise the unitary executive branch and as Commander in Chief and consistent with the constitutional limitations on the judicial power, which will assist in achieving the shared objective of the Congress and the President, evidenced in Title X, of protecting the American people from further terrorist attacks."

The Boston Globe quoted an anonymous senior administration official saying, "Of course the president has the obligation to follow this law, (but) he also has the obligation to defend and protect the country as the commander in chief, and he will have to square those two responsibilities in each case. We are not expecting that those two responsibilities will come into conflict, but it's possible that they will."

McCain stood next to President Bush at the signing of the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 with a tight-lipped grimace on his face. McCain did not raise any objection to President Bush exempting the executive branch from the reach of his anti-torture amendment. When asked about the signing statement by reporters, McCain made excuses and avoided any direct criticism of President Bush and his administration.

When his "Profiles in Courage" moment came, John McCain failed to rise to meet his rendevouz with destiny. Instead, President Bush publicly humiliated him and brought him to heel with his tail tucked between his legs like an obedient dog.

For all those reporters in the McMedia who are presently fixated on what Nancy Pelosi knew about the Bush torture program and when she knew it, your inquiry is more appropriately directed to John McCain, the man you idolize out of your own sense of inadequacy, for his complete failure to speak out against the illegal Bush torture program. McCain was the one man who had the moral stature with the public to challenge the illegal Bush torture program, but he failed to speak out. Whatever credibility and moral stature McCain once held as an opponent of torture was forever lost at that defining moment in time.

Sadly, it gets worse. McCain has now morphed into an apologist for torture. On April 26, 2009, McCain appeared on CBS's Face the Nation with his old friend (and softball questioner) Bob Schieffer. McCain was asked about the "torture memos" by Jay Bybee, John Yoo, and Steven Bradbury. His response McCain: Don't Investigate Torture Memos:

Appearing on CBS’ Face The Nation Sunday, the former Republican presidential nominee — who was himself tortured as a prisoner of the North Vietnamese — said, "Are you going to prosecute people for giving bad legal advice?" He suggested that Washington should ignore calls to investigate who was behind government lawyers writing memos which gave legal cover to the use of torture on detainees.

"We need to put this behind us," he told host Bob Schieffer. “We need to move forward. … We need a united nation, not a divided one."

* * *

He compared the current situation to President Ford’s decision to pardon President Nixon following the Watergate scandal.

"Most people in retrospect believe that the Ford pardon was right, because we moved on. We've got to move on," said McCain.

Schieffer pointed out that those on the other side of the debate would say that people will not believe America is serious about not using torture again unless those involved are "held accountable."

McCain responded that "they're going to be held accountable in the court of public opinion."

"It was bad advice," McCain said of the arguments laid out in the memos recently released by the Obama administration, which outlined the harsh interrogation techniques authorized for use by the Bush White House. “But if you criminalize bad advice on the part of lawyers, how are you going to get people to serve, and what sort of precedent does that set for the future?"

Senator Patrick Leahy followed McCain on Face the Nation and responded to McCain's assertions Reuters:

"It is not from some idea of vengeance in doing this. But we know that there were a number of people that made the decision to violate the law, a number of people who said that we don't have to follow our Constitution, others who wrote memos basically saying the president and the vice president are above the law," Leahy said on the CBS show.

Sen. Leahy reiterated his call for a special commission to get to the bottom of the Bush-era interrogation policies.

Yesterday in the Tucson Citizen (first published a week ago in the Wall Street Journal WSJ.com), Senators McCain and Lindsey Graham penned a guest opinion in which McCain repeated his "time to move on" theme Torture – Time to move on:

We believe that any subsequent attempts to subject those who provided such legal advice to prosecutions are a mistake. They will have a chilling effect on the candor with which future government officials provide their best counsel.

The country must move on from debates about the past, because pressing questions about U.S. detention policy in the war on terror requires us to make difficult choices – and to make them soon.

* * *

We believe that the time has come to focus on these urgent issues, rather than spend the nation's energy on the debates of the past.

The senators then try to change the subject of the torture debate to what to do about the detainees currently held at Guantanamo. Sorry senators, you do not get to change the subject.

Keep in mind that thousands of detainees have been processed through Guantanamo. Some of the detainees were enemy combatants, but a good many were not. Many were simply caught up in intelligence sweeps in Afghanistan – they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Others were falsely accused by rivals for the reward money offered by the U.S. military. Hundreds of prisoners have been returned home and released for such reasons. It was determined that they did not possess any useful intelligence and did not pose a continuing threat to the United States.

Several hundred more detainees remain at Guantanamo, almost all of whom have not been prosecuted and many yet to be charged with any crime. To simply brand all of the detainees who have passed through Guantanamo as enemy combatants who are too dangerous to ever be released, as Senators McCain and Graham write, is to deny these facts and reality.

Then there was the explosive revelation yesterday by Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff of the Department of State to Colin Powell during his tenure, about the genesis of the illegal Bush torture program. The Truth About Richard Bruce Cheney:

[W]hat I have learned is that as the administration authorized harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002–well before the Justice Department had rendered any legal opinion–its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qa'ida.

* * *

The detainee had not revealed any al-Qa'ida-Baghdad contacts yet. This ceased only after Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, under waterboarding in Egypt, "revealed" such contacts. Of course later we learned that al-Libi revealed these contacts only to get the torture to stop.

There in fact were no such contacts. (Incidentally, al-Libi just "committed suicide" in Libya. Interestingly, several U.S. lawyers working with tortured detainees were attempting to get the Libyan government to allow them to interview al-Libi….)

In other words, torture was not used in a "ticking timebomb" scenario to prevent another attack on the United States as Senators McCain and Graham suggest, but rather to physically coerce a confession – without regard to credibility – to provide the missing link between al Qaida and Saddam Hussein for the terrorist attacks on 9/11, and thus provide the Bush administration with a casus beli for war with Iraq. This will change the whole context of the debate.

In any event, whether torture produced any actionable intelligence is legally irrelevant. There is no exigent circumstances (i.e. "ticking timebomb") exception to the laws regarding torture. Torture is illegal. Period. Sen. Lindsey Graham's cavalier assertion yesterday that the Bush administration "saw the law many times as a nicety that we couldn't afford so they took a very aggressive interpretation of what the law would allow" is a damning admission.

Some prisoners made a commitment to jihadism against the United States only as a result of their experiences at Guantanamo. The Bush torture program created terrorist recruits. Even al Qaida has acknowledged that Guantanamo was the best recruiting tool it ever had.

I suspect the Senators' unspoken concern is that they do not want these prisoners who were tortured at Guantanamo speaking to human rights organizations, or testifying before Congress, or speaking with the media about being tortured and their conversion to jihadism.

Keep in mind that the top Bush administration official in charge of deciding whether to bring Guantanamo Bay detainees to trial concluded that the U.S. military tortured a Saudi national who allegedly planned to participate in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks… "We tortured [Mohammed al-]Qahtani," said Susan J. Crawford, in her first interview since being named convening authority of military commissions by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in February 2007. "His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that's why I did not refer the case" for prosecution. Guantanamo Detainee Was Tortured, Says Official Overseeing Military Trials 

Also keep in mind the Human Rights First Report: 98 Detainees Died in Detention, including as many as 12 having been tortured to death.

There is no question that torture occurred, it has been documented. The only question is whether we as a nation will live up to our national ideals that we are a nation of laws and will hold accountable those who have violated the rule of law.

John McCain, "Mr. Anti-Torture," says that "we need to put this behind us… we need to move forward… we've got to move on." He argues that no one should be held accountable for crimes of torture and murder. He is in the end a man who is without any priciples, or moral convictions, or faith in our enduring American values.

Senator McCain's defense of the illegal Bush torture program is utterly disgraceful. He is unworthy of his high office.