Martin DyckmanJohn McCain took the Senate floor last week to speak from his heart. It is a heart that beats in a body still bearing the effects of the tortures he endured as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. What he said deserves every Floridian’s thoughtful attention before the March 15 primary. Here is where you can read it in full:
http://gov.mtopgroup.com/art1/record/delta/2016/02/09/senate-section/article/S716-1
Votes were being cast in New Hampshire’s presidential primary as he spoke, and too many of them went to a man who boasts –boasts! — that he would authorize the torture of terrorism suspects.
“Not since medieval times have people seen what’s going on,” the candidate said. “I would bring back waterboarding, and I’d bring it back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding.” (Emphasis supplied)
Yes, that’s what Donald Trump said.
Not since medieval times — if ever — has anyone else holding or seeking power publicly prided himself on favoring torture. Plenty of tyrants have practiced it without remorse, but even with Hitler and Stalin it was not something to talk about.
McCain’s words were plainly aimed mainly at Trump, though Marco Rubio’s and Ted Cruz’s ears should be red too. The Senate vote against torture last year was one of the many Rubio has missed, but he says he would have voted the other way because he wants to keep terrorists guessing about what might happen to them. Cruz denies that waterboarding is torture and also refuses to rule it out.
Trump stands apart by being so diabolically explicit.
“While some have shamefully sought to minimize the practice of waterboarding,” McCain said, “it is clear to me that this practice, which is a simulated execution by drowning, amounts to torture as any reasonable person would define it, and how the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war, of which we are signatories, define it.”
As McCain went on to remind the Senate, Japanese generals were executed after World War II for war crimes that included the waterboarding of American prisoners. The current National Defense Authorization Act, which the Senate passed 91 to 3 last year, forbids torture “once and for all” by restricting interrogation techniques to those in the Army field manual. And the military has successfully questioned more terrorism suspects than “any other agency,” McCain said.
McCain quoted Gen. David Petraeus, whom he said he admires more than any other living military leader, as objecting to torture not only because it is wrong but because it is counterproductive.
“Torture produces more misleading information than actionable intelligence,” McCain said. The most important leads to Osama bin Laden didn’t come from torture, and it’s “an insult” to good intelligence officers “to assert that we cannot win this war on terrorism without such methods. Yes, we can and we will.”
But the main reason to oppose it, he said, isn’t that it fails; it’s that it’s wrong.
“It is about us. It is about who we were, who we are, and whom we aspire to be. It is about how we represent ourselves in the world….Our enemies act without conscience. We must not,” McCain said.
“Our nation needs a commander in chief who reminds us that in the worst of times, through the chaos and terror of war, when facing cruelty, suffering and loss, that we are always Americans –different, stronger, and better than those who would destroy us.”
His words are plainly lost on Trump, whose indecencies include mocking McCain for the captivity he suffered while Trump, spared from the draft, was living a rich kid’s life of luxury in New York.
But they beg to be taken to heart by anyone who would think of casting a vote for Trump.
Perhaps what Trump says is only “bluster as cheap campaign rhetoric,” as McCain put it. Even if it is only that — especially if it only that — it defines Trump as a punk with no moral compass, with no guiding star except an evil ego and an insatiable ambition, a degenerate willing to say any disgraceful thing to win votes.
Moreover, one of the most sobering lessons of history is to take demagogues at their word about what they would do it if they could do it. A candidate whose conduct demeans his country portends a president who would demean it even more. Torture would be only one of the ways.
Whether many Trump voters agree with him about torture is open to question, although his audiences seem to relish the red meat. His essential appeal is to people who aren’t sufficiently discriminating in how they rage against the so-called establishment.
Their anger at their government must be stronger than their respect for their country.
Floridians who vote for him — or, as matters now stand — for Rubio or Cruz will be endorsing torture whether they want to admit that or not. They will be voting to disgrace our country.
And that’s how the world would see it.
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Martin Dyckman is a retired associate editor of the newspaper formerly known as the St. Petersburg Times. He lives in suburban Asheville, North Carolina. Column courtesy of Context Florida.
