Wednesday, December 10, 2014

Why I Trust John McCain on Torture

He knows.

This is posted in the best effort to learn from the past. I'm not sure we have, so we need these reminders. Fortunately, John McCain, victim of North Vietnamese torture, is still in the Senate and can rebut most of those in his Republican Party who try to excuse or justify the use of torture by the United States. (OK, if you're still unsure whether "water-boarding = torture" I hope you can at least admit that anal forced-feeding is.)

John McCain cracked under torture. He gave his captors some true and some false information and some things they just wanted to hear. In this video, he is interviewed by a French journalist. The clip was used as propaganda throughout the Communist Block and beyond. I don't fault John McCain for what he did or didn't do while in captivity. He gave a pretty straight-forward accounting of it all in his book written with Mark Salter, Faith of My Fathers, (Random House, New York, 1999). I would never want to be in that place nor judge anyone who was.

People of American, can we please learn from history?

What to learn? The United States will not torture (again).

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