McCain and Torture

Nat Hentoff takes his shots at McCain for being insufficiently opposed to torture.

At the White House on March 5, Republican presidential nominee John McCain, glowing with George W. Bush's endorsement of him, said that "on the fundamentals and the principles of our Republican Party and most of the specifics of our shared conservative philosophy, President Bush and I are in agreement." Not mentioned over their lunch of hot dogs was their affinity for certain practices of torture in the war against terrorists, a continued reversal of McCain's convictions.

Back on Dec. 15, 2005, McCain, during a televised meeting with the president, was able to proclaim -- after Bush had yielded to McCain's demand to support legislation against torture -- "We can move forward and make sure that the whole world knows that, as the president has stated many times, that we do not practice cruel, inhuman treatment or torture."

....

Said Petraeus: "What sets us apart from the enemy in this fight ... is how we behave. ... Some may argue that we would be more effective if we sanctioned torture or other expedient methods to obtain information from the enemy. They would be wrong. ... In fact, our experience in applying the interrogation standards laid out in the Army Field Manual on Human Intelligence Collector Operations that was published (in 2006) shows that the techniques in the manual work effectively and humanely in eliciting information from detainees."

Why did McCain vote against a single standard proved effective by the Army Field Manual -- especially since he used to say about torture: "It's not who they (the enemy) are. It's who we are."

McCain's watery explanation of his vote: "We always supported allowing the CIA to use extra measures. ... What we need is not to tie the CIA to the Army Field Manual." McCain continued to say his vote against the single standard is "consistent" with his former convictions. He doesn't say how it is.

I do have a couple of questions.

Petreas says that the methods laid out in the Army Field Manual "work effectively and humanely in eliciting information from detainees."

There was a case in Germany where a kidnapper had buried his victim, an 11-year-old boy.  The deputy police chief overseeing the case believed the boy had been buried alive, possibly thinking of cases where a kidnap victim had been stored in a coffin or other underground container with a limited air supply.  He ordered his officers to threaten the kidnapper with torture.  A few minutes after the threat was made, the kidnapper led investigators to where the boy was buried.  Unfortunately, this was not an "underground storage" situation; if the boy was not already dead when buried, he suffocated soon thereafter.

However, had the boy been alive, which the Deputy Chief had reason to believe was the case, I'd like to know if Army Field Manual techniques could have obtained the boy's location in as short a time as the threat of torture did.

In other words, if time is of the essence (interrogators seem to have an instictive visceral reaction to "ticking time-bomb scenario", even though this is as close as we get to one without explosives), are the Army Field Manual techniques really quicker and more effective than waterboarding or even convincing threats have proved to be?

Are they even a fraction as quick and effective?

If you need information out of a detainee within fifteen minutes to save some number of lives, is there a number of lives that would, in your opinion, justify waterboarding?

For more on this topic, and more background: click here.