October 27, 2005
Respect McCain's Experience With Torture
By Richard
Cohen
Five years
ago, I went to Vietnam with Sen. John McCain. We went to the so-called
Hanoi Hilton, the jail where American POWs were kept and where
McCain spent much of his 5 1/2 years in captivity, most of the
time being brutalized, some of the time being tortured. It was
a dark, fetid place where waves of claustrophobia washed over
me and I wanted to flee, as McCain could not have done. ``Nice
place, huh?'' he said to me as we left. For the stoical McCain,
it amounted to a primordial scream.
I closely
watched McCain that day. I know only a few people who were tortured
and never had I accompanied any of them back to where they were
put in so much pain. But McCain is not a let-it-all-hang-out sort
of guy. He does not weep on cue or choke for the cameras, but
he does resolve. Somewhere along the way, he apparently resolved
that what happened to him should not happen to anyone else --
especially at the hands of Americans.
So McCain's
amendment, added to a $440 billion military spending bill, would
ban the U.S. military and other government agencies -- the CIA,
for instance -- from engaging in ``cruel, inhuman or degrading
treatment'' of detainees. The Senate approved the amendment 90
to 9. Whatever it meant to 89 of them, to McCain it was simply
a matter of doing to others what he would have wanted done unto
him. It is, in that sense, a very old idea.
Stunningly,
George W. Bush has threatened to veto this measure. Bush has vetoed
not one bill all of his presidency but would, he says, veto this
one. The threat borders on the preposterous, or maybe the idiotic,
because it is hard to imagine any president vetoing a measure
that forbids torture, given the black eye the U.S. has already
received over the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad.
After that, Bush would have to issue his veto in the middle of
the night and have it recorded in invisible ink. I'd leave it
to Karen Hughes to explain that to the Islamic world.
It's worth
noting that the very conservative Sen. Lindsey Graham supports
McCain in this effort. Graham was a judge in the Air Force. It
is worth noting, too, that Sen. John Warner also supports McCain.
He was once secretary of the Navy and a veteran of both World
War II and the Korean War. Colin Powell also supports this amendment.
He was once just about everything, including a combat Army officer.
As you can see, McCain has not assembled a group of bleeding-heart
liberals, or so the insulting caricature goes. His coalition is,
virtually, America in miniature.
The administration
says the amendment would shackle American intelligence gathering.
Indeed it would. That's the whole idea. But while some interrogators
might be inhibited, they would not necessarily be impeded in their
work. The apparent utility of ugly interrogation procedures can
often be a chimera. Put a man in enough pain and he'll tell you
anything -- anything you want to hear, that is. More important,
putting such extreme measures out of bounds provides every American
with guidelines. They sure could have used some at Abu Ghraib.
Vice President
Dick Cheney, the administration point man in its effort to defeat
or water down the McCain amendment, is now seeking an exception
for the CIA. This makes no sense since the military could merely
turn over a detainee to the CIA and, anyway, when you think about
it, even CIA agents are Americans. In other words, they too ought
to be bound by an American ethic: There are some things we will
not do.
President
Bush is infected with a Frank Hague complex. Hague was the longtime
(1917-47) mayor and political boss of Jersey City, N.J., who supposedly
waved aside an inconvenient statute by proclaiming, ``I am the
law!'' Bush has done something similar, trashing the Geneva Conventions
and asserting the government's right to jail anyone for any time
for any reason -- as long as national security is at stake. The
many laws and precedents that limit government authority do not,
Bush insists, limit him. He is, as always, a firm believer in
what he believes.
But this
is no time for tautologies. The experience McCain brings to the
question of torture has to be respected. If not, it is appallingly
conceivable that someday someone could take the press to a spot
and say, here -- here in this dark and fetid place -- is where
he was cruelly abused by Americans. We would all be degraded by
that.
©
2005, Washington Post Writers Group
