John McCain and the Torture Issue

The New York Times has a piece out this morning highlighting McCain's opposition to torture in the primaries. I am no big fan of John McCain, but I do admire the fact that he is the only Republican willing to say in this campaign that torture does not work and is wrong. According to the Times,

On a bitterly cold morning last week, diners at the Whistle Stop Cafe in Boone, Iowa, were just sitting down for their morning coffee when Senator John McCain entered. Within minutes, Mr. McCain turned to a hot-button topic for which he literally serves as the living embodiment: the subject of torture.

“One of the things that kept us going when I was in prison in North Vietnam was that we knew that if the situation were reversed, that we would not be doing to our captors what they were doing to us,” he said.

When Mr. McCain brings up the issue of torture, he is often met by a complex response. Many of the Republican voters he courts do not agree with his opposition to aggressive interrogation techniques that many have condemned as torture. But they are often captivated by his discussion of the issue, in some cases even moved to tears, as was the case in Boone.

On the campaign trail, Mr. McCain does not dwell on the personal details of his five and a half years as a prisoner of war, the “torture ropes” in which he was bound day and night, or the beatings he endured. But as he speaks, the physical reminders of his wounds are there for all to see, from the stiffness of his arms, which to this day he can only painfully raise above his head, to the shortness of his stride, a result of injury and subsequent beatings.

Mr. McCain has been speaking out more forcefully about the issue as it has bubbled up recently on the campaign trail and in debates.


“I know how evil this enemy is,” Mr. McCain told the Boone audience. But the issue is about more than one technique, he said. “This is really fundamentally about what kind of nation the United States of America is.”

But Milt Mattson, standing outside the cafe after Mr. McCain left, said he thought the United States needed to take any measure it deemed necessary.

“This is a war for our life,” Mr. Mattson said. “These are people that chop heads off. I don’t care what we have to do to stop them.”

First of all, the New York Times should lay off of the 'aggressive interrogation techniques' buzzwords and call it what it is-- torture. Secondly, I find it incredible that some Republican voters find the torture issue a 'complex' issue. Never in my life did I believe that this would be a topic of any presidential campaign by either party in our country in the 21st century. If we as a country had acted like this during the Cold War, I guess we would have chained any suspected Communists naked to a wall and beat them to their senses. Scream democracy, boy!

We wonder why our moral standing as a nation has declined and are stunned to find out that we are not the most popular kid on the block anymore. We act in outrage when our fellow citizens speak out against any of these policies or the politicians responsible for implementing them. I am frankly tired of seeing some of our citizens willing to throw away the many rights and freedoms many brave citizens have fought for in our history. Moral values be damn. They think that the only way to fight extremism is to act like an extremist, torture and all. Their talk of the current situation being 'the war for our life' is cheap and only serves to fear monger people into believing that this is a 'anything goes' kind of war.

As a side note, maybe this Mr. Mattson who so strongly believes in torture because 'these are people who chop heads off' needs to talk with our pals in Saudi Arabia. They have doubled their beheading count for the year.