I know that my colleague Elijah Sweete has just very briefly commented on this story.
But having written a previous post on Senator John McCain’s courageous, correct and consistent position on torture; having some very strong convictions on this issue myself and with my apologies to Elijah, I just can not let this one slide by.
As Elijah points out, presidential candidate, never-been-tortured, never-even-served-in-the military, torture apologist Rick Santorum has the temerity and the shamelessness to claim that John McCain simply “doesn’t understand how enhanced interrogation works.”
Referring to an American hero, a POW who was viciously tortured for more than five years by the North Vietnamese, torture expert Santorum, appearing on Hugh Hewitt’s conservative, evangelical radio show, said that McCain not only doesn’t understand torture—he is “misguided”— but that he has got it all wrong: “I mean, you break somebody, and after they’re broken, they become cooperative. And that’s when we got this information. And one thing led to another, and led to another, and that’s how we ended up with bin Laden.” It’s just as simple as that…
Santorum also claims that those within the intelligence community, who were involved in torture, should be given medals.
I guess, since Santorum is no longer a Senator, he didn’t hear McCain’s impassioned speech on the Senate floor last week where McCain said: “That’s false,” referring to reports that “the intelligence that led to bin Laden … began with a disclosure from Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who broke like a dam under the pressure of harsh interrogation techniques that included waterboarding. He loosed a torrent of information — including eventually the nickname of a trusted courier of bin Laden.”
McCain then went on to reveal what CIA Director Leon Panetta had told him:
… the trail to bin Laden did not begin with a disclosure from Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times. The first mention of Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti — the nickname of the al-Qaeda courier who ultimately led us to bin Laden — as well as a description of him as an important member of al-Qaeda, came from a detainee held in another country, who we believe was not tortured. None of the three detainees who were waterboarded provided Abu Ahmed’s real name, his whereabouts or an accurate description of his role in al-Qaeda.
I guess Santorum owes the Senator from Arizona an apology. No, make that several apologies. No, make that, never mind.
