Does John McCain Support Torture?
Talk is cheap, especially in an Orwellian world. We all know that George Bush can stare into a camera and declare “we not not torture” without flinching. John McCain has been adamant in the past about his opposition to torture. And to be fair, he was at one time a hero in the Republican party on this issue, opposing waterboarding, and introducing the “McCain amendment” under which (i) detainees under the department of defense could be subject only to interrogation techniques listed in the Army Field Manual; (ii) no person under the custody of the US government, no matter the agency or location could be subjected to “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment.” This was not uncontroversial, as the Bush administration and allies pushed for a CIA exemption. In the end, Bush issued a signing statement intended to weaken this act.
In 2008, there was an attempt to close the CIA loophole once and for all. A “Feinstein amendment” declared that all agencies of the U.S. government, not just the military, must conduct interrogations in line with the Army Field Manual. In essence, it codifies what many saw as the intent of the McCain amendment, preventing the Bush administration from outsourcing its dirty work to the CIA. And here’s the amazing thing: John McCain voted against this amendment. As Marty Lederman put it: “Senator McCain Condemns Torture — But Votes Against the Bill That Would Prevent It”.
McCain issued a detailed statement to explain himself. He basically argued that the original legislation “allowed the CIA to retain the capacity to employ alternative interrogation techniques”. Of course, he noted, these techniques could not constitute “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment”, which included waterboarding. Case closed. But there is a problem. We all know what techniques the CIA has been using, and waterboarding is but one of them. As Marty Lederman notes, “Senator McCain voted against it, presumably because he wishes that the CIA be permitted to continue the use of otherof its enhanced techniques, apart from waterboarding. Those techniques are reported to include stress positions, hypothermia, threats to the detainee and his family, severe sleep deprivation, and severe sensory deprivation.” These techniques also happen to include some of the treatments meted out to McCain by his captors in Vietnam. By his own logic, therefore, he was not tortured.
In conclusion, despite his clear stance in earlier years, McCain’s descent into “crazy base world” (as he admitted to John Stewart) entails a refusal to vote against torture. And that is on the record, and gives him clear proximity to the evil acts conducted by the CIA. The rest is just semantics.
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MM,
Let us be more charitable here.
It’s not that John McCain does not care. It’s just that he is not aware what’s going on.
Mr. Lederman’s mistep is here:
“presumably because he wishes that the CIA be permitted to continue the use of otherof its enhanced techniques, apart from waterboarding.”
This is bad logic – because he didn’t support that particular piece of legislation, he therefore supports torture? Really?
Misleading and demagogic.
There is no reason to think that McCain took this position because he wanted the CIA to be able to engage in “torture” of any kind. To the contrary, McCain explained:
Instead, McCain’s opposition was based on the fact that, in his view, the Army Field Manual went much further than just prohibiting “torture”:
If you want to educate yourself by actually reading the Army Field Manual, you’ll find that it mandates the following treatment for prisoners:
So is it your belief that failing to apply all of those highly protective standards constitutes a vote for “torture”? Come on. If we captured Osama bin Laden and wanted to question him about his plans and associates, would you really think that he should have a right to refuse to answer any questions beyond name, rank, and serial number? Should he have the right to retain all of his personal effects? Would you think it “torture” if someone said, “By the way, we’re going to bomb your training camp”? [That's a threat of harm to property.]
There are serious issues here, if you want to break beyond petty and uninformed demagoguery.
McCain’s descent into “crazy base world” (as he admitted to John Stewart) entails a refusal to vote against torture.
No, it doesn’t. Zach is right. Your statement is little different than saying “McCain / Obama voted the party line 95 percent of the time” when so many votes in the Senate are unanimous.
Look at his policy statements – which have been consistent – and isolate each vote for seperate consideration. Has he ever advocated or sought to insert support for a torture method, for example? Such an analysis would be far more instructive than presumption, no? You’re reaching here like a party partisan.
“Should Osama have a right to refuse to answer any questions beyond name, rank, and serial number?”
In substance, this sounds like the 5th amendment to me – whether we like it or not in this particular circumstance.
In general, I’m wondering wheter a country should have different laws regulating interrogation for different agencies, which would also touch upon the question whether prisoners in Guantanamo Bay can legally be treated differently than prisoners in Hawaii.
But, let’s be charitable to Senator McCain on this one.
McCain/Palin. Obama’s toast.
The poison pill is a common partisan technique. Say there’s a problem X. Just for fun, propose a bill that bans X, Y, and Z, knowing that your partisan opponents would never vote to ban Z, and not really intending to ban Z yourself. Then when your opponents predictably vote against the bill, you can pretend that your opponents are all in favor of the problem X.
“Name, rank, serial number”? Nice attempt to deflect, but the real issue– as McCain himself states– is the ability of the CIA to engage in “alternative interrogation techniques”. And every dog on the street knows exactly what those techniques constitute.
Uniformed? Again, nice try, but I believe Marty Lederman is one of the leading experts in this area of law.
You know, you sound a lot like people defending Obama’s vote for abortion. McCain refused to vote against torture. Admit it, and save the hissy-fit.
Marty is also a diehard partisan Democrat, so I’m not counting on him giving a fair interpretation to McCain’s positions. See, this is another example of the sort of cognitive bias that psychologists study all the time . . . you trust anything Marty says in a blog post, not bothering to think for yourself, because he’s on your team and therefore you like what he says.
It’s useful to see it demonstrated, though, that you can’t come up with any explanation for why everything in the Army Field Manual actually should apply to Osama bin Laden, nor can you come up with any explanation for why anything not allowed by that Manual constitutes “torture.”
Of course Obama supports torture. He allows babies to be placed on a cold table and suffer hypothermia and dehydration until death. That’s surely torture.
Can you demonstrate that McCain meant “torture” when he said that the CIA should be able to use “alternative interrogation techniques” but NOT if they are “unduly coercive”? Of course not.
What’s going on here is exactly as if the Republicans proposed a bill that banned 1) infanticide up to 1 year old, 2) abortion, 3) contraception, and 4) any sex outside of heterosexual marriage — never expecting it to pass, of course — and then when Democrats voted against it, went around bombastically saying that “Democrats support infanticide of 1 year olds.”
Funny, SB, that’s exactly why Obama vetoed the born alive bill in Illinois. I’m not defending his behavior here, so why are you defending McSame?
To rephrase, can you demonstrate that McCain meant to allow “torture” when he said that the CIA should be able to use “alternative interrogation techniques” but NOT if they are “unduly coercive”? In other words, is there any evidence — beyond a diehard Democrat’s “presumably” — that McCain intended for the CIA to keep someone awake for a week straight on the theory that such a technique is merely an “alternative” but is not “unduly coercive”?
No it’s not the same, MM, and you know it. Obama defended his vote on the theory that requiring doctors to care for babies might somehow jeopardize abortion. But you seem to agree that such an excuse is not a good one, and that politicians ought to vote to restrict abortion. Hence, Obama didn’t have a valid excuse to vote against a bill banning X and (purportedly) Y — banning Y, by your own beliefs, was precisely something that Obama should have been willing to do too.
Here, however, no one — not even you, given your inability to respond to this point — thinks that McCain was truly obligated to give Osama bin Laden and his henchmen all of the protections that I listed above. If you had an example of McCain specifically voting to allow certain torture techniques, that would be one thing. All you have is McCain’s vote against a bill that would have limited interrogation to name, rank, and serial number. That’s not the same thing.
Another difference, if you stop to think about it, is this:
1) The Illinois born-alive bill wouldn’t have had any effect on Roe. That was purely imaginary. Obama’s excuse was therefore not believable in any way.
2) The Feinstein poison pill would most definitely have had an effect miles beyond just banning certain torture techniques — which, by the way, McCain seems to have believed were already illegal. If the Democrats had been serious about banning those torture techniques, they would have introduced a bill that did so expressly.
SB, you won’t convince MM, but your information about McCain’s position convinces me that he does not understand his position as allowing the CIA to engage in torture.
Thanks, S.B., very imformative. Following the legal aspects of this can be difficult.
Politically, you raise also a good point:
No it’s not the same, MM, and you know it. Obama defended his vote on the theory that requiring doctors to care for babies might somehow jeopardize abortion.
This article seems to be a useful and balanced summary of McCain’s positions: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/630/
I find it absolutely appalling that SB would liken an attempt to ban torture as a “poison pill partisan technique”. This is not a game, this pertains to one of the instrincally evil acts at play in the current political environment.
So Marty Lederman is wrong because he is a Democrat? And actually, for your information, I have been planning this post for a whole, and made the outline of the case in one of Mark Shea’s comboxes. In writing this, I asked, what does Marty Lederman have to say? And what do you know, he confirmed my initial instincts.
Let me spell it out: the CIA’a use of “alternative interrogation techniques” is not some abstract legal concept. It refers to a very specific set of techniques, the ones Lederman refers to. And these techniques constitute torture. McCain never disputes that, as be focuses only on waterboarding. A little more impartiality would help you to see that. But no, you are the guy who claimed that the dissenters in Heller were simply objectively and absolutely wrong…
“No individual in the custody or under the effective control of an element of the intelligence community or instrumentality thereof, regardless of nationality or physical location, shall be subject to any treatment or technique of interrogation not authorized by the United States Army Field Manual on Human Intelligence Collector Operations”
This refers specifically to TREATMENT and INTERROGRATION TECHNIQUES (capitalizing to get it into your head). This has nothing to do with “name, rank, number”. Look at what McCain says: “it was not my intent to eliminate the CIA interrogation program, but rather to ensure that the techniques it employs are humane and do not include such extreme techniques as waterboarding… In view of this, the legislation allowed the CIA to retain the capacity to employ alternative interrogation techniques… [waterboarding] is no longer in use.” Like I said, we all know what these techniques actually are. McCain is simply implicitly saying that they do not constitute cruel or unusual or degrading treatment,
Check your own link, SB: it makes the theoretical case that since McCain never publicly advocated for the extension of the Army Field Manual to the CIA, he is not guilty of the charge of flip-flopping.
But more substantively:
“Tom Malinowski, the Washington director of Human Rights Watch, said he disagreed with McCain’s vote and believes “it put us in a position where we will have to wait until January to definitively end the country’s experiment with torture.”
Some may argue that McCain missed a pragmatic opportunity in February to achieve his aim of preventing the CIA from waterboarding — or that he buckled to the administration in an election year.
Again, are you ever going to be able to explain, as to this:
First, are you saying that any and all of the above actions are “torture”? Asking an Al Qaeda leader to guide us to bin Laden (as per the last phrase above) would be “torture”?
Second, on what basis — other than a diehard Democrat’s imagination — are you saying that when McCain refers to his wish to preserve “alternatives” that aren’t “unduly coercive,” he specifically meant to support the use of, say, hypothermia, rather than all of the many techniques that the Army Field Manual would also prohibit?
All you’ve been able to say is “we all know what these techniques actually are.” Nonsense. That’s the furthest thing possible from a persuasive argument. You think you know “what these techniques actually are,” only because it’s in your partisan interest to paint McCain’s intentions and beliefs in the worst possible light. But you don’t actually know what he was thinking at all. Nor do I see any evidence that you care what his motives and beliefs really were.
On what basis? On the basis that these are the techniques that have been approved by Bush-Cheney since 2002. Honestly, your argument is like allowing teenagers free access to bars, because they might only be interested in mineral water. I really didn’t think you were this deluded.
I find it absolutely appalling that SB would liken an attempt to ban torture as a “poison pill partisan technique”.
I find it absolutely appalling that you would say this. Disagree with me if you like, but at least represent my position accurately.
Namely: I find McCain believable when he says that in his view, other existing laws already bar CIA torture. I also interpret McCain as having said that the Army Field Manual would bar many practices or “techniques” that are NOT, in fact, torture. (Again, you’re avoiding the question whether it would be “torture” to ask Khalid Mohammed to lead us to bin Laden, or to threaten to destroy an Al Qaeda training camp. Yet both actions could have been prohibited by your “anti-torture” bill.) I also find it implausible that Democrats couldn’t have drafted a specific anti-torture bill if they had wanted to do so.
On what basis? On the basis that these are the techniques that have been approved by Bush-Cheney since 2002.
Well, the same could be said of waterboarding. Therefore, by your logic, McCain supports waterboarding. Oops! The reality is that McCain thinks waterboarding — as well as other “coercive” techniques — is already illegal under existing law. He said that “a fair reading of the prohibition on cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment outlaws waterboarding and other extreme techniques.” Therefore, it is flatly wrong to claim that McCain wants the CIA to use the “extreme techniques” other than waterboarding.
Moreover, as quoted above, McCain expressly says that the Detainee Treatment Act bars the CIA from using “unduly coercive techniques.” Therefore, when McCain says that the CIA should nonetheless be allowed to use “alternative” techniques, he isn’t talking about the same coercive techniques that are illegal. He’s talking about something else.
Sigh. On waterboarding, McCain takes comfort from the fact that “administration officials have stated in recent days that this technique is no longer in use.”
Lederman: “If Senator McCain believes that there are particular “enhanced” techniques that are not in the Field Manual, but that are also not torture or cruel treatment, and wishes to allow the CIA to use them, he should identify what they are, and offer legislation that would authorize those, and those only, techniques, in addition to those listed in the Field Manual. Otherwise, despite all his worthy efforts in this area, Senator McCain is now facilitating the CIA’s use of techniques that are unlawful, including some that are torture even by Senator McCain’s own lights.”
A more appropriate rewrite:
If MM truly believes that there are particular “enhanced” techniques that are torture or cruel treatment, but that are not already prohibited by the Detainee Treatment Act, and he wishes to bar the CIA from using them, he should identify what they are, and offer legislation that bar only those techniques, rather than pretending that the only way in which to do so was a vague reference to the Army Field Manual (which covers issues far removed from “torture”).
Boil it down, for simplicity’ sake. You think that there was a bill barring “torture,” and that McCain voted against it for the reason that he secretly wanted the CIA to be able to use expanded techniques that really do amount to torture.
McCain, however, didn’t see the bill as one revolving around “torture,” and neither do I. As he saw it, waterboarding AND other “unduly coercive” or “extreme” techniques were ALREADY illegal under the Detainee Treatment Act (for which he had fought). Thus, when Feinstein proposed to bar anything and everything beyond the highly restrictive standards in the Army Field Manual, it wasn’t a bill about “torture” at all. It was a bill holding the CIA to a standard far and beyond the avoidance of torture.
When someone thinks, “I’ve already voted to ban all torture; but I’m not going to vote to ban other interrogation techniques that have nothing to do with torture,” it is demogagic to say that he “support[s] torture.”
I think writing off McCain’s Vietnam torture experience as nothing by comparing to anything the current administration may be doing is a bit intellectually dishonest without enumerating the differences and similarities of both government’s implementation of torture.