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It isn’t anymore about whether what the CIA so clinically and technically calls enhanced interrogation techniques is torture or not.
That was settled a long time ago when Americans first heard and read about waterboarding, dark cages, black sites and all.
Nor is it about whether torture is illegal and immoral. That has been settled many times and many ways by law, by international conventions and, most important, by who we are.
Now that the ugly truth has been laid totally bare, it is about how Americans will react to what has been called the “stain on our soul.” Whether they will try to remove the stain once and for all or just whitewash it, live with it and be condemned to repeat it again.
Timothy Egan writes about how two men, “two old men,” — the war hero and the chicken hawk — are handling it.
Egan:
They’re old men now, one unable to dress himself without help, the other living with a transplanted heart. Old men with stories to tell and tailor for posterity, stories that might still bend history. When they were young men, they had choices to make, and those choices shaped what they said this week about an awful breach in American values.
You guessed it.
One is John McCain “the impetuous one, though duty-bound by family to serve. He fought in the unpopular war, was shot down, captured by the enemy and tortured. Everything he knows about what coercion and pain do to the truth, he learned from personal experience in a cell in Vietnam.”
The other, of course, is Dick Cheney who “took a more calculated route. In and out of colleges, he dodged the war with five draft deferments; he said he ‘had other priorities in the ’60s than military service.’ Early on, he learned how easy it was to evade responsibility.”
Egan describes Cheney’s recent behavior as that of a “petulant child caught and cornered,” who, when confronted with the evidence “proclaimed the exhaustive inquiry ‘full of crap.’”
While Egan says it is impolite to call Cheney a liar, he refers to the headline of a piece written by Mark Fallon, a man “who was on the inside — the special agent in charge of a task force that sought information from numerous terror suspects.” That headline: “Dick Cheney Was Lying About Torture.” Fallon’s conclusion, according to Egan:
…what any fair-minded reader of the Senate report will conclude: that “at no time” did the torture program produce intelligence that averted a terrorist threat. Nor did it lead to Osama bin Laden. That break came from a detainee, Hassan Ghul, who “sang like a tweetie bird” from the outset, as one officer said.
How about the other “old man”? The one with whom so many of us disagree politically, even on such major issues as the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, Syria, Iran, ISIL, etc. But also the “old man” who knows all about torture, whose body was broken by it, but never his principles, never his soul.
That man — the only Republican unequivocally condemning the program on the floor of the Senate last Tuesday, when his Republican colleagues either quibbled or were silent — true to his “straight talk” reputation and even more true to American values spoke his heart and his conscience.
Responding to Republican quibbles and sophisms, foiling those who wanted to debate everything else but the damning contents of the report, Senator John McCain said, “The truth is sometimes a hard pill to swallow. It sometimes causes us difficulties at home and abroad. It is sometimes used by our enemies in attempts to hurt us. But the American people are entitled to it, nonetheless.”
Falling back on his own experiences with torture and on his deeply held values, McCain said: “Most of all, I know the use of torture compromises that which most distinguishes us from our enemies, our belief that all people, even captured enemies, possess basic human rights.”
Egan concludes:
As McCain walked off the floor, with the cautious gait of a man physically hobbled by his service nearly a half-century ago, Senator Feinstein kissed him on the cheek. It was a way of saying thanks to a war hero whose words, if this country believes what it preaches, will outlast the scowling remarks of a chicken hawk.
The third old man?
This author, younger than McCain, but older than Cheney, has expressed his views on torture ad nauseam and shares Senator Feinstein’s appreciation for John McCain’s courage, straight talk and love of country.
The author is a retired U.S. Air Force officer and a writer.