An Internet hub with domestic and international news, analysis, original reporting, and popular features from the left, center, indies, centrists, moderates, and right
McCain, Torture, and The Truth
Last week, Senator and Presidential-hopeful John McCain strode into the lion’s den (a.k.a., The Daily Show with Jon Stewart) and made some strong statements against the torture of POWs.
Those statements prompted wild cheers and applause from the audience, although not everyone was impressed.
In response, I did some homework on the subject and reached a conclusion, outlined this afternoon at Central Sanity. As you’ll see, my conclusion there is incomplete, and I’m thus in search of some additional (qualified and objective) input.
If you fit the bill and can help, please chime in. I suspect we’ll all learn something in the process.
2 Responses to “McCain, Torture, and The Truth”
I really don’t understand the criticism of McCain and the MCA. What the MCA does is provide specifics on what types of violations constitute “grave” breaches of common article 3 in the GC – breaches that amount to war crimes. CA3 is, itself, quite vague and open to interpretation. I would think that explicitly stating types of acts are prosecutable as war crimes under US law is a good thing. With no common legal definitional standard, President Bush could (and did) define article 3 almost however he wanted.
Some have criticized the act because it apparently “leaves out” some acts and therefore, the argument goes, implicitly makes them legal. That might be true if the MCA were the only law on the subject, but it is not. Additionally, the MCA defines only what are “war crimes” – there are acts that do not rise to the level of “war crime” yet are still illegal and prosecutable under US law. For example, some have claimed that certain kinds of rape are acceptable under the MCA but those critics neglect to mention that such abuses are not permitted under other law, such as McCain’s Detainee Treatment Act, the CAT (which is the only international treaty that actually defines “torture”), etc.
The MCA, obviously, is not perfect and there are a few areas I think should be and could be changed. Still, critics of McCain seem to think he should vote against any legislation that’s not perfect. In such a case, no legislation would ever get passed. Better to have an imperfect law now – a law that can be amended – than to have no law at all. Rarely does the first iteration of legislation come out “perfect.”
I wonder why the critics of McCain, who has done more than any other elected official of the US to prohibit detainee abuse, are not equally critical of rest of the US Senate which has done nothing.
Entropy – Precisely my point. Thank you for elaborating and bringing additional perspective to this discussion.