Time wonders whether John McCain has changed his views on torture. They've obtained a 2005 draft of legislation McCain was planning to introduce that would have required all components of the U.S. governments to adhere to the interrogation standards set by the Army Field Manual.
These days, McCain follows the direction of the director of the CIA, Mike Hayden, who argues that the field manual's list of techniques is necessarily limited. Rank and file soldiers can't be expected to learn to interrogate prisoners with the same effectiveness as trained interrogators; it doesn't make sense to limit specialists in interrogation to general techniques that every soldier is required to assimilate.
McCain (and Hayden) still seem to the draw line at torture: the specific techniques are subject to intensive legal review and anything that strikes McCain as torturous -- and he clearly has a broader definition of torture than the Bush Administration -- would still be prohibited.
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What's tortured is the Time article. It comes down to saying that McCain has flipflopped but fundamentally not changed, that he has allowed the CIA to use torture but that he is against torture, and that the press cannot write about McCain's policies without seeking excuses for him - mostly of the kind, "He said this but he doesn't really believe it", or "He voted for this but he actually wants the opposite".
I don't get this from Marc's post: "McCain (and Hayden) still seem to the draw line at torture." They do?
What do you call torture? Isn't that what this is all about? Isn't that exactly why Congress wants to define and delimit allowed interrrogation techniques - and why Hayden by contrast wants a fuzzy situation where anything goes as long as it is followed by a president's pompous and meaningless phrase "the US does not use torture"?
Posted by Hans B | April 11, 2008 4:48 AM