What we have become
In 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?
According to the Bush administration’s definition of torture, McCain was therefore not tortured. </em>
That, in a nutshell, shows exactly how far we have fallen. What was accepted as torture around the world has been erased by Orwellian language and blood lust. I’m currently reading Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side– with clinched teeth, because the story it tells is so revolting, so anti-American, that you must quell the urge to scream with each page. If there is a hell, we know that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld are there, but as this book shows, save places for John Yoo and David Addington, who are, ironically, constitutional lawyers. Ironic, because its clear they don’t believe in the Constitution at all. They are the little rats behind the power, scribbling exceptions into the margins of our Bill of Rights, trampling due process and giving legal cover to our breaking of international treaties and obligations. They are below contempt.
But how about McCain?
Now the kicker: in the Military Commissions Act, McCain acquiesced to the use of these techniques against terror suspects by the CIA. And so the tortured became the enabler of torture. Someone somewhere cried out in pain for the same reasons McCain once did. And McCain let it continue.
These are the prices people pay for power. </em>
John McCain, who can’t utter a public statement on anything without he or his AARP fan club interjecting “He was a POW for five years”, he doesn’t believe he was tortured either.
So it begs the question: Other than raw power and his wife’s cash, what does John McCain believe in…really?
And why is nobody asking him about it?
