Debate Fact Check 4
McCain said in the debate:
' So we have a long way to go in our intelligence services. We have to do a better job in human intelligence. And we've got to -- to make sure that we have people who are trained interrogators so that we don't ever torture a prisoner ever again.'
Last winter, McCain voted against a bill that would have disallowed waterboarding by the CIA.
US Intelligence Chief Mike McConnell has essentially admitted that waterboarding is torture.
The bill McCain rejected would have constrained CIA operatives from violating the interrogation techniques outlined in the Army Field Manual, a public document.
McCain wanted the CIA to continue to be able to deploy secretive interrogation techniques not mentioned in the Army manual. Of course, we don't know what those are or whether they meet the definition of torture. In any case, McCain had a chance to force Bush to stop waterboarding and he declined to take it.
McCain continues to say he is against waterboarding, which makes his vote hard to understand.
Here is McCain on Bill O'Reilly last May:
'CHANNEL "THE O'REILLY FACTOR" INTERVIEW WITH SENATOR JOHN MCCAIN
(R-AZ) INTERVIEWER: BILL O'REILLY SUBJECT: WATERBOARDING, IRAN, IRAQ WAR, PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN TIME: 8:37 P.M. EDT DATE: FRIDAY, MAY 9, 2008
(Begin videotaped interview.)
MR. O'REILLY: Let's take war on terror first. You're opposed to waterboarding.
SEN. MCCAIN: Yes.
MR. O'REILLY: And I disagree with you on that. I think the president of the United States, just the president, should have the legal authority to order waterboarding in extraordinary circumstances. Now, according to Tenet and to President Bush, used three times on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, al-Nashiri and Abu Zubaydah. All three times, the men broke when they were waterboarded, and they gave out information, according to the Bush administration, that saved thousands of lives.
SEN. MCCAIN: Well, first of all, the scenario you're talking about is one million to one. Second of all, well, you know that when torture anybody, we know, that they'll give you things only that that they want you to --
MR. O'REILLY: These people gave up very good information.
SEN. MCCAIN: They gave up very bad information, too, according to some sources. But the point is, do you want to abrogate the Geneva Conventions? In the next war that we're in, if you want an American tortured, a service man or woman, by some foreign country when we're in another war and because we did it to the people in our captivity --
MR. O'REILLY: (Inaudible) -- not soldiers, though. They're not entitled to Geneva Conventions.
SEN. MCCAIN: Yes, they are.
MR. O'REILLY: No, not a one.
SEN. MCCAIN: The Geneva Conventions apply -- oh, in all due respect, I'll send you the information. Geneva applies to every person who is held in captivity by another country.
MR. O'REILLY: Even criminals?
SEN. MCCAIN: Even criminals if they are in combat. Now, there's a difference between uniformed combatant and non-uniformed combatant.
MR. O'REILLY: Do you think 9/11, they were combatant soldiers, though?
SEN. MCCAIN: I think we're in a war against radical Islamic extremism, and I think that war is all over the globe. And I believe, as Colin Powell does and these military officers who have spent an entire career, that the Geneva Conventions call for a prohibition --
MR. O'REILLY: They apply to everybody.
SEN. MCCAIN: -- a prohibition for inhumane, cruel and degrading treatment. And their concern is what happens to Americans in future wars if they are held captive.
MR. O'REILLY: Now, we're not fighting a nation now.
SEN. MCCAIN: We are fighting a conflict. And the Geneva Conventions have clear applications.
MR. O'REILLY: We'll have a gentleman's disagreement on that one. Dick Morris wants me to ask you this question.'
(Uh, O'Reilly cannot have a gentleman's agreement with anyone; he is not a gentleman. Even if it weren't for the Great Loofah Scandal, he obviously supports torture.)
posted by Juan Cole @ 9/27/2008 12:01:00 AM
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2 Comments:
Juan,
This is the first time I have ever simply read Bill O'Reilly without his intonations. I didn't think it possible he could sound anymore like a bullheaded arseclown. They should put Mccain next to him more often, makes Johnny-boy sound a *lot* more sensible.
-- Nait
Quis custodiet? Watch
[1] JSM [AZ Senator J. Sidney McCain] thinks pre-Musharraf Pakistan was a failure?
[2] "In the debate, McCain promised ‘victory’ in Iraq and praised the suRGe"?
[3] JSM refusal to talk to rogues endorsed by Herr Prof. Dr. Kissinger of Harvard and Hanoi and San Clemente?
[4] JSM endorses rigorous scientific examination of Long War™ prisoners?
[5] JSM "also warned about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and warned about corporate greed and excess, and CEO pay, and all that"?
[6] SLHP [AK Governess S. Louise Heath-Putin (sp?)] once went to college -- or maybe she just went a-partyin’?-- in Hawaii?
__
That is an odd pattern of polemical birdshot -- odd even if the student eventually decides to exclude the final item as having wandered in from some other day’s diatribe by accident. [*]
Now the OBVIOUS point of attack was none of the above, but rather "We tried to build a little ship called the Littoral Combat Ship that was supposed to cost $140 million, ended up costing $400 million, and we still haven't done it."
Just kidding. Sort of. But there are a couple of serious sides to even an overpriced and underrealised LCS:
(1) Whose littoral is it that Team Aggression has been makin’ plans for?
(2) Must not one admit that the issue is ideally suited to the qualifications and capabilities of Rear-Cap’n M’Cain, both quâ former naval person and quâ Concord-Coalitionite ?
Once the Ghost of Tsongas Past hoves into sight, so does the essence of the Commanderissimo’s electoral strategy as conceived by himself. It is difficult to believe, but there it is in the transcript , unmistakable: J. Sidney expects the holy Homeland to prefer him over Senatorino Obama chiefly because he is a tax-cutter and a budget-balancer, a sort of Ross Perot Redux! That notion is so extraordinary that one almost hopes that it originated with Dr. Altzheimer: in that case, it will be unnecessary to shoot anybody who is still alive for puttin’ J. Sidney up to it.
It is a bit rude, perhaps, to insinuate senile dementia, and maybe in fact the political disease is less grave. JSM may have painted himself into his silly corner with no malady worse than political myopia or astigmatism: "John Sidney Magoo," as it were, cannot clearly distinguish swing voters from extremist House Republicans at any distance beyond five paces. It is presumably true that Sen. Shelby and Rep. Boehler and their gang are receivin’ zillions of e-mails from all across the fruited plain implorin’ them to Just Say NO to Hindenburg and Ludendorff and Barney Frank. (Plus NO to George XLIII Bush too, if anybody still remembers who that little laddie was.) However few, if any, of these wallet-felt appeals from the Party base and vile are based on Concord Coalition orthodoxy. Wingnut City and Rio Limbaugh don’t want to pay a dime more in taxes themselves personally, but as to whether that leaves Uncle Sam’s national books balanced, it is ludicrous to imagine that they give a hoot.
J. Sidney admittedly don’t know much ’bout economics. In his primary political rôle as dumb Mugwump, what he requires is some lofty-soundin’ occasion for moral showboatin’, and Concord Coalitionism fits his peculiar requirements admirably. The fit is so extremely comfy that it may seem unimportant to the Commanderissimo that hardly anybody else in sight shares his requirements. Or maybe his isolation is of utmost importance to him, for what would become of God’s Country if everybody in it were as patriotic and virtuous and bipartisan and courageously self-profilin’ as J. Sidney McCain alone has the honour and glory to be? If JSM makes it to the White House, the rest of the Baní Concord are likely to find him a difficult Coalition pardner. (Not even to mention what the rest of the Party of Grant and Hoover and Goldwater and Atwater are likely to find him!)
---
That is enough to indicate how I’d go after the Fabulous Flyboy’s scalp. The gentry of Ann Arbour choose to adopt a scattershot or fact-checking approach. Well, OK, whatever it takes! There do not seem to be many Americans left who find the relentless McCainiac grandstandin’ and self-esteemism vomit-inducing in itself, so it will not do any damage to prove him mistaken about particular points.
Still, that remains an odd list of points, so odd that I cannot even make out whether it is in old-fashioned numerical order or counted backwards down towards zero as neotrendies prefer. The item of least weight is surely [3], right in the middle. The weight of [3] is so very light that perhaps it should just be scrapped, especially if the voice from the peanut gallery is correct in claiming that Herr von Kissinger admits to agreeing with Cap’n M’Cain about nonnegotiation. In any case, who cares?
Next least weighty is [5]. I'd scrap this one too, but for a very different reason, namely that Senatorino Obama wants to claim that HE told us so in advance. That claim is very shaky, I believe, so let us not tempt Fate by raising the subject at all. J. Sidney cannot be sanely accused of havin’ any concrete plan for Fannie and Freddie and Barney at this point, a fact that one can point at without discussing whether or not JSM did once, in some vaguely mortgage-assurance-related context, suggest that Greed and Incompetence might be bad. "That was then, this is now!" covers this one adequately.
Third least weighty is [1], with which we arrive at a real policy question. Maybe. In itself, of course, the question of whether Pakistan was to be pigeonholed as "a failed state" nine years ago is the merest tertiary educationalism. Let the History Department look into it and report back when their inquest is concluded! And should we miss the report when it comes, well, perhaps the sky won’t fall on that account.
JC finds a present-related angle, though: "Given this 'failed state' allegation against the civilian politicians now in power in Pakistan, hasn't McCain just screwed up any chance he had of a close working relationship with the new government?"
A reasonable question, to which the most reasonable answer is NO. The staff and management of the most recent Islámábád neorégime are not likely to be so hopelessly parochial and retrograde and ‘feudal’ and generally out of it that they cannot make allowances for what foreign pols say from electoral necessity. "Of course," they will reflect to themselves, "His Excellency had to talk like that to please the Yankee street people. In private he is bound to be far more sensible."
His Excellency bein’ in fact a very dumb Mugwump, there may be some nasty private surprises in store for the Pakistani hogen-mogens, who are not likely to have run into that particular brain disease before. But they certainly have no respectable grounds for complaint yet. We'll see. Time will tell. Don’t count your screw-ups before they are hatched.
Solid policy substance only sets in with [2] and [4], J. Sidney’s real or alleged views on suRGin’ and waterboardin’. For a moralistical showboat like Sid, torture is bound to seem far more important than mere victory, so let us begin with the former.
Or no, let us not begin. JC and many other doves and donkeys have already scribbled whole encyclopaedias of data and sophistry to prove either that suRGin’ does not work at all, or else, a bit less crudely, that suRGin’ gives a treacherous superficial appearance of working but is bound to collapse in a heap any day now. "Dr. Gen. Petræus of Princeton’s Wonderful One-Hoss-Shay," don’t you know?
I have nothing new to say on the suRGe product itself. As to the marketing of it, with only five weeks to the election, one had better resign oneself to the obvious: conventional wisdom and Televisionland think suRGin’ has been the greatest thing for the violence profession since sliced bread and night baseball, that Dr. Gen. Petræus twinkles in the West Point firmament like Albert Einstein in the Princetonian ditto. There is so little time, that anything short of a ticker-tape parade through New Baghdád for Mr. Bin Ládin and Dr. Zawáhirí is unlikely to change the misadvised Homelandish mind. So prudence dictates that we say as little as possible about ‘Iráq’ as possible: "One, two, three -- all together, now! IT'S THE ECONOMY, STUPID!"
Last and mugwumpiest, T-O-R-T-U-R-E.
Item [4] is factually founded, no doubt about that: "Last winter, McCain voted against a bill that would have disallowed waterboarding by the CIA."
The AnnArbourites are bound to disagree with me about this one, I fear, for they used to enjoy the dumb Mugwump shtik. It will have seemed edifying to them when J. Sidney would Rise-Above-Party™. They were never in perfect accord with the levitator himself, though, because it would obviously not quite do for donkeys to rise above the Democracy. When Sen. Lieberman pulled "the same stunt," J. Sidney may have been almost the only American to believe in the full sameness of it. Everybody else picked Holy Joe up by the stunt end, though naturally the exact nature of the stunt looked different depending on whether Joe was renegading towards or away from the individual observer.
In short, what JC cites as proof of the Commanderissimo's moral degeneration seems to me a sign of improvement. Has J. Sidney finally mastered his low mugwump hormones? May we hope that he will never again break with the Big Management Party simply because it makes him feel so good to be a m*v*r*ck? Has the Fabulous Flyboy finally grown up?
I would not bet a quarter on that proposition, myself. Nevertheless, here was an excellent occasion for more self-courage stuff -- but the soon-to-be Commanderissimo of AEI and GOP and EiB actually managed to restrain himself. "Maybe there is hope for us all?"
Unlike JC, evidently, I take for granted that J. Sidney had not the slightest wish that his Uncle Sam’s spooks immediately start waterboardin’ the lesser breeds without at will. To abstain from prohibition is not the same thing as a positive command.
Since I begin by giving J. Sidney high marks for narcissism and omphaloscopy, I go on to ask everybody to notice that his triumph over the base urges of Self was twofold. In addition to missin’ an obvious opportunity of his own, he actually extended his own peculiar self-privilegin’s to others. In the current state of the statute book, all sorts of low-grade officer material and junior James Bonds can savour the exquisite pleasures of McCainianity: "Of course I could torture this uncredentialled-combatant scumbag of a Global Tourist if I liked. There is -- thanks be to Sedona! -- no law to prevent me, nothing would happen to my career if I did. But no, I will not do it! I am above all that, far above!! Why, I, too, am a season-ticket passenger on the Straight Arrow Express!!!"
Yuck.
But God knows best. Happy days!
___
[*] The Commanderissimo of AEI and GOP and EiB mentioned his estimable Unterhauptführerin only once, half as often as somebody called "Miss Congeniality," Christian name undisclosed.
Governess Heath-Putin was awarded Planet Sedona’s most prestigious civilian decoration, however: "I have a long record and the American people know me very well and that is independent and a maverick of the Senate and I'm happy to say that I've got a partner that's a good maverick along with me now.
Maverick Second Class. Golly.
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