Sunday 31 August 2008

McCain and torture

Just in case you missed it - Andrew Sullivan made the excellent point a couple of weeks ago that John 'subject-verb-PoW' McCain was not tortured as a PoW according to the bastardised Bush definition of torture. What he went through was just the use of enhanced interrogation techniques, or whatever Orwell-esque phrase is currently in vogue in Bushland. And, to add an extra seasoning of irony, Sullivan claims that in supporting the Military Commissions Act, McCain acquiesced in CIA use of these same techniques against terror suspects. "And so the tortured became the enabler of torture."

Sullivan has been great on the torture point. Putting aside the moral obscenity of it all,  its sanctioning at the top of the administration has been surely one of the most catastrophic global political mistakes of the Bush presidency, up there with Rumsfield and the DoD running roughshod over the careful work of the State Department in relation to war- and post=war planning Iraq.  

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