Posted by
Always To The Right on Tuesday, February 19, 2008 4:17:04 PM
From the Captain. My point with this is to show that the Democrats, with their press allies, are starting to attack McCain, their favorite "maverick" until now. I do not agree with McCain on this.
The Los Angeles Times
puts itself in the unusual position of scolding John McCain over his
opposition to torture, claiming that he betrayed his principles in
voting against the legislation sponsored by Dianne Feinstein in the
Senate last week. The editorial says McCain should be ashamed for his
vote and accuses him of abetting torture, when McCain has good reason
to believe that the Feinstein bill does more damage than benefit . . .
This is part of the Democratic attack on McCain in its infancy. They
want to paint him as a crazed warmonger and have already begun taking
his remarks out of context to do so. Now they want to sour his
relationship with independents and moderate Democrats by hailing the
Feinstein bill and casting him as a villain for opposing it.
Unfortunately, it could work, but the truth is somewhat different.
McCain has opposed waterboarding and other forms of torture for
years, even while both Democrats and Republicans in Congress tacitly
approved it in the aftermath of 9/11. He authored a bill in 2006 that
he believes outlawed both without making the mistake of giving our
enemies our playbook. Since no acts of waterboarding have occurred
after 2003 and the CIA had already banned the practice, there won't be
any test cases, but clearly McCain sees the Feinstein bill as
superfluous -- and worse.
The idea that the Army Field Manual defines torture is a fallacy on
which this entire argument rests. The AFM details what Army
interrogators may do, but it doesn't provide the ur-text of
non-torture. The AFM, by the nature of our democracy, has to be a
public document, but CIA practices should not and do not need to be
publicized. By holding the CIA to the confines of the AFM, we take a
lot more than waterboarding off the table, including barking dogs,
which hardly constitutes torture in any practical or reasonable sense.
If you could save one life by having a dog bark at a detainee, would you do it? For Pete's sake, who wouldn't?
McCain opposed this legislation because it's simply a badly-written
bill that hands a training manual to our enemies. It's not just
unnecessary, it damages our ability to glean information by limiting
our options and allowing our enemies to prepare for American
interrogation.