You Make The Call!

The Daily Dish's Andrew Sullivan asks today's profound question: Was John McCain tortured?

To any reasonable person, and Sen. McCain himself repeatedly during this campaign, the answer would be yes. To the completely unreasonable people who created our current interrogation policy, it would be no. Sen. McCain, in another life (last year), voted for these new interrogation techniques.

Cheney denies that McCain was tortured; as does Bush. So do John Yoo and David Addington and George Tenet. In the one indisputably authentic version of the story of a Vietnamese guard showing compassion, McCain talks of the agony of long-time standing. A quarter century later, Don Rumsfeld was putting his signature to memos lengthening the agony of "long-time standing" that victims of Bush's torture regime would have to endure. These torture techniques are, according to the president of the United States, merely "enhanced interrogation."

No war crimes were committed against McCain. And the techniques used are, according to the president, tools to extract accurate information. And so the false confessions that McCain was forced to make were, according to the logic of the Bush administration, as accurate as the "intelligence" we have procured from "interrogating" terror suspects. Feel safer?

So let's ignore the fact that Sen. McCain was tortured, because according to what he voted for, he wasn't. Now he's just a POW. But he's not Jack Bauer, as he has been hilariously comparing himself to during this campaign.

Let's take the hero out of McCain, please. If he's a hero, than American interrogators have made heroes all over the Islamic world over the last few years.