McCain Clears the Air on Torture

In the aftermath of Osama bin Laden’s death, the merits of enhanced interrogation are at issue again.  Required reading on the topic is Senator John McCain’s (R-AZ) op-ed in the Washington Post on Thursday.  For anyone who distinguishes between “new McCain” and “old McCain,” this is old McCain at his finest: principled, independent, and convincing.

The headlines responding to McCain highlighted his assertion that torture doesn’t work, but this is selling him short.  True, it takes my breath away to read from a Vietnam POW, “I know from personal experience that the abuse of prisoners sometimes produces good intelligence but often produces bad intelligence because under torture a person will say anything he thinks his captors want to hear — true or false — if he believes it will relieve his suffering.”  And he counters those who claim the enhanced interrogation led to the successful mission against Osama bin Laden by citing CIA director Leon Panetta, who told him that waterboarding produced false intelligence.  But McCain’s most important point is far simpler: “Ultimately, this is more than a utilitarian debate. This is a moral debate. It is about who we are.”
Stop and read that again.  John McCain doesn’t care whether torture works or not.  It is immoral, and if we want to be the good guys in this world, we must act the part.
Response: Excuses
Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey responds with two points: a factual claim that waterboarding did, in fact, help lead to bin Laden, and the observation that it was legal at the time – that is to say, before official policy abandoned waterboarding in 2006.
On the factual claim, it’s impossible to fact-check two people with access to classified information when they make contradictory claims, so let’s just say that the successful mission to Abbottabad was the result of a wide collection of intelligence, and waterboarding probably contributed at least a little bit to the dossier.  Any exaggeration or complete dismissal of waterboarding’s role would be wrong.
Mukasey’s legal claim is more bizarre.  It is tautologically accurate – waterboarding was legal because the Justice Department said it was legal – but entirely irrelevant.  McCain never said the Bush administration broke the law; he said they were committing a moral wrong.  It reflects poorly on the character of our government that the attorney general would respond to an accusation of moral wrongdoing with the simple defense, ‘It was lawful.’
Perhaps Mukasey focuses on legality because he worries that members of the Bush administration will be tried for war crimes of some sort.  If so, he is fighting a straw man.  Though there are leftist Americans who consider George W. Bush a war criminal, they are not mainstream.  No one with influence is interested in taking members of the Bush administration to court over enhanced interrogation, unless new reports of serious misbehavior emerge.
Mukasey’s response, then, ignores McCain’s true message.  This is not about utility or legality.  This is a question of moral identity: Are we the type of nation that uses torture?
Response: Not Good Enough!
Andrew Cohen at the Atlantic has a different response for McCain, and his core argument is valid but unfairly overstated: John McCain may be against torture, but by fudging the definitional limits of the word ‘torture,’ McCain allows ambiguity into his apparently principled stand.
I’m inclined to give McCain far more credit than Cohen does. It seems unfair to call McCain a flip-flopper for a consistent position that allows for gray areas.  Basic incarceration is damaging in some ways, but it is manifestly not torture.  Waterboarding – a simulated execution by drowning – is torture by any reasonable definition.  Solitary confinement is probably not torture, but sensory deprivation looks like it is. What about solitary confinement in a dark, sound-proof room – a mild form of sensory deprivation?  While Cohen would like morality to be absolute, reasonable people will disagree over what is and isn’t torture.
McCain hasn’t drawn the line clearly; Cohen is right.  But McCain is enough of a statesman to respond to fear and vindictiveness with maturity and leadership; he writes, “As we debate how the United States can best influence the course of the Arab Spring, can’t we all agree that the most obvious thing we can do is stand as an example of a nation that holds an individual’s human rights as superior to the will of the majority or the wishes of government?”  Let us be the City on a Hill that we claim to be.
Who are we, America?
Our terrorist enemies are evil, and they commit evil acts against non-combatants. Torture might make America a safer country to live in; I’d rather build a country with moral principles worth dying for. In the past week, that simple moral imperative has been lost amidst the partisan hackery and gotcha fog.  Thank you Senator McCain for clearing the air.
The only question that should concern us is not whether torture works but what constitutes torture.  Like Andrew Cohen, I would like to see Senator McCain make more explicit statements about other “enhanced interrogation” techniques, but in the meantime, McCain’s moral courage far outshines that of his peers.