Double Talk Express: John Mccain Flip-Flops on Torture bill

In all the discussion of John McCain's recently recovered memory of a religious epiphany in Vietnam, one thing has been missing. The torture that was deployed against McCain emerges in all the various accounts. It involved sleep deprivation, the withholding of medical treatment, stress positions, long-time standing, and beating. Sound familiar? According to the Bush administration's definition of torture, McCain was therefore not tortured. 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? The cross-in-the-dirt story - although deeply fishy to any fair observer - is in the realm of the unprovable. But the actual techniques used on McCain, and the lies they were designed to legitimize, are a matter of historical record. And the government of the United States now practices the very same techniques that the Communist government of North Vietnam once proudly used against American soldiers. When they are used against future John McCains, the victims will know, in a way McCain didn't, that their own government has no moral standing to complain. Now the kicker: in the Military Commissions Act, McCain acquiesced to the use of these techniques against terror suspects by the CIA. And so the tortured became the enabler of torture. Someone somewhere cried out in pain for the same reasons McCain once did. And McCain let it continue. These are the prices people pay for power. http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/08/was-mccain-tort.html#more Last night I was clicking back and forth between the Mets/Yankees game The Empire Strikes Back on cable. I hadn't watched Empire in a long time. There's a scene where Darth Vader tortures Han Solo (which occurs off-screen, but Han's screams are audible). Han is then dumped into the room with Lando and Pricess Leia, and the Imperial thug says contemptuously, "Don't worry. He won't be permanently damaged." So include Darth Vader -- Darth fucking Vader -- among the prestigious company we're keeping with our sure-it-hurts-like-hell-but-if -it-doesn't-leave-a-mark-it -ain't-torture approach to interrogation. The Nazis came up with this argument first. It took half a century before Bush and Cheney followed their lead. http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/05/enhanced-interr.html -------------------------------------------- In his op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today, Karl Rove remembers something that was done to John McCain in Vietnam: "Another McCain story, somewhat better known, is about the Vietnamese practice of torturing him by tying his head between his ankles with his arms behind him, and then leaving him for hours. The torture so badly busted up his shoulders that to this day Mr. McCain can't raise his arms over his head. One night, a Vietnamese guard loosened his bonds, returning at the end of his watch to tighten them again so no one would notice." This is what is called a "stress position." It was authorized, monitored and practised as a torture technique by this president, whose chief adviser at the time was Karl Rove. Rove even planned to run the 2006 Congressional campaign on the message of being tough enough on prisoners in American custody. In the same op-ed, Rove refers warmly to McCain's Bangladeshi adopted daughter - the same daughter his surrogates demonized in the 2000 campaign, by spreading rumors that McCain had a black illegitimate daughter. Every now and again, one is shocked by the Big Lies and chutzpah that come out of a man as utterly indifferent to the truth as Rove. And then one realizes: this is what these people do for a living. They say anything to retain and wield power. http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/04/rove-stress-pos.html