\nIn all the discussion of John McCain’s recently recovered memory of a religious epiphany in Vietnam, one thing has been missing. The torture that was deployed against McCain emerges in all the various accounts. It involved sleep deprivation, the withholding of medical treatment, stress positions, long-time standing, and beating. Sound familiar?<\/p>\n
According to the Bush administration’s definition of torture, McCain was therefore not tortured.<\/p>\n
Cheney denies that McCain was tortured; as does Bush. So do John Yoo and David Addington and George Tenet. In the one indisputably authentic version of the story of a Vietnamese guard showing compassion, McCain talks of the agony of long-time standing. A quarter century later, Don Rumsfeld was putting his signature to memos lengthening the agony of “long-time standing” that victims of Bush’s torture regime would have to endure. These torture techniques are, according to the president of the United States, merely “enhanced interrogation.”<\/p>\n
No war crimes were committed against McCain. And the techniques used are, according to the president, tools to extract accurate information. And so the false confessions that McCain was forced to make were, according to the logic of the Bush administration, as accurate as the “intelligence” we have procured from “interrogating” terror suspects. Feel safer?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
<\/p>\n
So either McCain was put through conditions that are perfectly acceptable (to our government’s eyes) as a means of ongoing interrogation, and certainly don’t constitute torture — or, if he was, in fact, tortured, that’s exactly what our government is doing.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
(via Les)<\/p>\n
<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Well, of course he was. Looking at the litany of mistreatment as a POW in the hands of the North Vietnamese, how could we not call it torture? Um ……<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_robots_follow":"","_seopress_robots_imageindex":"","_seopress_robots_snippet":"","_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_robots_breadcrumbs":"","_seopress_robots_freeze_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_custom_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_canonical":"","_seopress_social_fb_title":"","_seopress_social_fb_desc":"","_seopress_social_fb_img":"","_seopress_social_fb_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_height":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_title":"","_seopress_social_twitter_desc":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_height":0,"_seopress_redirections_value":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled_regex":"","_seopress_redirections_logged_status":"","_seopress_redirections_param":"","_seopress_redirections_type":0,"_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[54,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13003","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-elections-2008","category-homeland-security"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":48846,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2014\/12\/10\/mccain-on-the-torture-report.html","url_meta":{"origin":13003,"position":0},"title":"McCain on the Torture Report","author":"***Dave","date":"Wed 10-Dec-14 12:55am","format":false,"excerpt":"I've been repeatedly, and gravely disappointed by John McCain several times over the past decade-plus. But he's spot on here, informed not by ideology but by his own experience as a tortured prisoner of war in Viet Nam.'The use of torture compromises that which most distinguishes us from our enemies,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "~PlusPosts"","block_context":{"text":"~PlusPosts","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging\/plusposts"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":11728,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2008\/02\/14\/mccain_votes_against_tort.html","url_meta":{"origin":13003,"position":1},"title":"McCain votes against torture ban","author":"***Dave","date":"Thu 14-Feb-08 8:57pm","format":false,"excerpt":"Sen. McCain has a long rep, since his days as a POW in Vietnam, as a staunch opponent of torture, though there's been a large dollop of public relations covering...","rel":"","context":"In "Elections 2008"","block_context":{"text":"Elections 2008","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/politics-law\/elections-2008"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":48948,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2014\/12\/15\/dick-cheney-presents-the-slippery-slope-of-torture.html","url_meta":{"origin":13003,"position":2},"title":"Dick Cheney presents the slippery slope of torture","author":"***Dave","date":"Mon 15-Dec-14 7:17am","format":false,"excerpt":"Granted that the Bush Administration was noteworthy for never, ever, admitting it had made a mistake, this particular article on Dick Cheney's current attitude -- as given on \"Face the Nation\" yesterday -- is appalling. In short, real torture was the killing of 3,000 people on 9\/11, so if it's\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "~PlusPosts"","block_context":{"text":"~PlusPosts","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging\/plusposts"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":14651,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2009\/04\/28\/unblogged-bits-for-tuesday-28-april-2009.html","url_meta":{"origin":13003,"position":3},"title":"Unblogged Bits for Tuesday, 28 April 2009","author":"***Dave","date":"Tue 28-Apr-09 6:00pm","format":false,"excerpt":"Links (most recent first) that caught my eye, but did not warrant full-blown blog entries .... Your plan for the (probably not) coming apocalypse - Yeah, I am going to have to do one of these posts. Though I suspect I will not be nearly as survivable as Doyce &\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Crime & Punishment"","block_context":{"text":"Crime & Punishment","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/politics-law\/crime-punishment"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":12783,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2008\/09\/28\/four_more_years_2.html","url_meta":{"origin":13003,"position":4},"title":"Four more years?","author":"***Dave","date":"Sun 28-Sep-08 7:53pm","format":false,"excerpt":"So the below Daily Show goodness is amusing enough, but what I found particularly disturbing is watching the before-after comparing Bush in 2003 and\u00a0Bush in 2008. \u00a0 \u00a0 People talk...","rel":"","context":"In "Elections 2008"","block_context":{"text":"Elections 2008","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/politics-law\/elections-2008"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":12925,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2008\/09\/05\/the_mccain_speech_reviewe.html","url_meta":{"origin":13003,"position":5},"title":"The McCain speech reviewed","author":"***Dave","date":"Fri 5-Sep-08 8:09am","format":false,"excerpt":"The NY Times editorial nails it: Thursday night, Americans mainly saw the old John McCain. He spoke in a moving way about the horrors he endured in Vietnam. He talked...","rel":"","context":"In "Elections 2008"","block_context":{"text":"Elections 2008","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/politics-law\/elections-2008"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13003","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13003"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13003\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13003"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13003"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13003"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}