Posted on 12/10/2014 11:41:35 AM PST by Starman417
That's how radio talk show host and law professor Hugh Hewitt has been describing Senator McCain for years.
Tuesday, Senator Feinstein finally saw the release of her Majority Views "Torture" Report. Absent from the 5 year investigation is any participation from Republicans who sit on the Senate Intelligence Committee. They perceived the Feinstein investigation as a partisan exercise. So what we're left with, absent the Minority Views Report, is a non-bipartisan (re: partisan), $40 million investigation tinted and tainted by a Democrat's worldview lens in interpreting the information they used to draw up the Report.
Senator Feinstein spoke yesterday on the Senate floor for an hour defending her tortured Report. She was joined by Senator McCain:
Sen. John McCain of Arizona, a former GOP presidential nominee and prisoner of war who was tortured in North Vietnam, rose to Feinstein’s defense Tuesday in opposition to his own party, citing “personal knowledge of torture’s inefficacy.”McCain said the report’s release reminds the country that “we are always American, different, and better than those who would destroy us.”
As a former Vietnam POW, who experienced brutal treatment and real torture at the hands of his captives, McCain's words carry weight and influence with most mainstream Americans:
In a nearly 15-minute speech from the Senate floor, McCain offered what is arguably the most robust defense so far of the report's release, referencing his own experience as a prisoner of war in Vietnam and rebuking his Republican colleagues by endorsing the study's findings.I'm sorry, but with all due respect to the great American, lousy senator, and terrible Republican, Senator McCain reveals his lack of understanding in the role EITs played in CIA interrogations. "Torture", if you will, was not applied in order to illicit law enforcement confessions or extract information. Questions were not asked during an enhanced interrogation session that the CIA did not already know the answers to. EITs were meant to bring about a state of cooperation, after which the real mining for intelligence information would begin during debriefing.
~~~ most poignantly, McCain spoke of his own five-and-a-half-year captivity in Vietnam to argue that torture fails to yield credible information.
"I know from personal experience that the abuse of prisoners will produce more bad than good intelligence. I know that victims of torture will offer intentionally misleading information if they think their captors will believe it. I know they will say whatever they think their torturers want them to say if they believe it will stop their suffering."
McCain added (emphatically) that "the use of torture compromises that which most distinguishes us from our enemies, our belief that all people, even captured enemies, possess basic human rights."Basic human rights? OK. Signatory or not to the GCs, everyone has basic rights. What captured terrorists don't deserve, however, is the kind of protections afforded to lawful, uniformed soldiers. Why not? Because to grant terrorists POW status is to undermine part of the purpose of the GCs, which is to protect innocent civilians.
The GCs give maximum protection to non-combatants- innocent civilians. The next level of protection is afforded to fighters who obey the laws of war. The least amount of protection is given to those fighters who do not obey the rules. The GCs operates on an incentive system. Giving terrorists the same privileges as that of lawful soldiers removes the incentive not to blend in with an innocent civilian populace, putting civilians at greater risk of being harmed.
I had written previously on McCain's hallowed status as a Vietnam POW, when he used it as an aegis in delivering a 2011 op-ed, criticizing EITs as amounting to "torture". Back then, I wrote:
John McCain is intimately familiar with torture, having endured it at the hands of his Vietnamese captors during his years as a POW.Since the release of the Feinstein Report, I now know the number to be 119 HVDs. Apparently, the number of detainees who experienced EITs is more than 30, as well.But he was never waterboarded. Not by the Spanish Inquisition. Not by the Japanese military. Not by the restrictive nature of the program as run by our CIA. And to be clear, he was tortured not to extract information that might save lives; he was tortured out of cruelty for torture’s sake; and he was tortured to elicit a false confession for propaganda purposes. EITs are not used to obtain either confessions or information.
Nor was McCain ever an interrogator. Not in the FBI. Not in the military. Not in the CIA.
Yet McCain, like “Matthew Alexander” (Anthony Camarino), commands “authority” and respect on the topic matter because of their respective experiences.
The CIA interrogators involved in the program that used EITs on 30 out of 100 high value detainees that came into their hands (the other 2/3rds having received standard interrogation practices) are not at liberty to write books nor defend themselves from slander and distortions in the media; nor are they free to counter Alexander’s testimony that comes buttressed with credible experience as a successful military interrogator.
In Marc Thiessen’s book, Courting Disaster, the former Bush speech writer does a great job at trying to rectify the misperceptions and distortions regarding the nature of the CIA program that has been so relentlessly villified.In one chapter (read pages 158-164), Thiessen also includes the opinions of 3 distinguished former Vietnam POWs to counteract the opinion of John McCain.
George Everett Day, Leo Thorsness, Jeremiah Denton are highly decorated war veterans and former POWs who experienced terrible torture at the hands of their captors. They scoff at the notion that what the CIA subjected their detainees to, up to and including waterboarding, even remotely amounts to their definition of torture.
I think Republicans and those who feel the CIA acted in good faith, and who acted honorably to defend our country, and who perceive the Majority Views Report as a politically partisan investigation, should still take the information within the Report seriously. We on the right do ourselves a disservice to dismiss outright the findings in the Feinstein Report. Stories like this one are sad. Of course, mistakes are made, as in all wars. And we should own up to them, where they occur. I have a difficult time, however, believing that we owe ourselves and the world any kind of apology, however, for the overall CIA program. As Noah Rothman points out:
(Excerpt) Read more at floppingaces.net...
I remember him as one of the 8 senators in the savings and loan scandal. I still don’t know how he survived that scandal and how the GOP decided he was worthy of the presidential nomination in 2008.
I agree. Being an admirals hot-shot son who crashes a bunch of airplanes, one in enemy territory, does not necessarily make one a great American.
LOL!
SJB, today is just not an LOL day, my FRiend. McCain and others like him have just undone the Mid-Term Election. Cave-in.
” McCain and others like him have just undone the Mid-Term Election. Cave-in.”
I posted this on about 20 threads today.
A “Great American” would not serve as a ringer for a traitorous Communist Mohammadan.
The ease with which he won the nomination still baffles me. Despite his high negatives and zero support among the GOP's conservative constituency, its core, he nonetheless clinched the nomination before the end of January.
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