How to pass for a Maverick

The great Maverick McCain voted to support the Cheney-Bush torture policy in the Senate this week, as Paul Kiel explains in TPM Muckraker's Today's Must Read for 02/14/08.

St. McCain's alleged opposition to the torture policy is one of the current bedrocks of his Maverick image among his adorting fans in the press.

E.J. Montini of The Arizona Republic blogs in Does McCain's tortured logic support torture? 02/05/08 explains, in complete accord with the press corps' Maverick script for the great saint, that the Maverick is only voting for torture this week because of all the nasty political pressure:

The vote appears to represent McCain's recognition that a large number of the voters he is trying desperately to attract have no problem with extracting information from bad guys by using any means necessary.

McCain used to say that Americans were better than that. But that was before he got so close to being president. When he was better than that.

While it's true that the Republican base has made supporting torture a key Party value, the is classic press conventional wisdom. The possibility that the Maverick voted to sustain the torture policy because he supports the torture policy isn't even considered.

The truth is that McCain's famous anti-torture law, the 2005 Detainee Treatment Act (DTA), was a bad joke. Cheney and Bush were already disregarding the existing laws against torture. Why would passing a new one make any difference? And when Bush used a signing statement to basically say he didn't care nothin' about no stinkin' law, the bold Maverick said he was just fine with that. James Bovard wrote in Power of the Pen The American Conservative 07/17/06 issue:

Bush’s most famous signing statement was on the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005. After White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales publicly declared that Bush enjoyed a “commander in chief override” regarding laws prohibiting torture, members of Congress enacted legislation to make it stark that torture was illegal. The White House engaged in long and arduous negotiations with Congress. After Bush signed this law last Dec. 30, he announced that he would construe it “in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President to supervise the unitary executive branch and as Commander in Chief and consistent with the constitutional limitations on the judicial power.” This was widely interpreted to mean that the law is binding only when Bush pleases. He was reiterating a confidential 2002 Justice Department memo that declared that the federal Anti-Torture Act “would be unconstitutional if it impermissibly encroached on the President’s constitutional power to conduct a military campaign."

But it wasn't just the signing statement. In fact, the DTA included the Graham-Levin amendment which blocked Guantánamo detainees being tortured in violation of the same law from having recourse to the courts for relief. In effect, the amendment was designed to make the anti-torture provisions unenforceable, at least for detainees at the Guantánamo gulag.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) described the disgraceful thing this way (U.S.: Landmark Torture Ban Undercut 12/16/05):

After months of opposition, President Bush yesterday accepted Senator John McCain’s amendment banning the use of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment by U.S. personnel anywhere in the world, and prohibiting U.S. military interrogators from using interrogation techniques not listed in the U.S. Army Field Manual on Intelligence Interrogation.

But the legislation containing the McCain Amendment currently includes another provision – the Graham-Levin Amendment – that would deny the five hundred-some detainees in Guantánamo Bay the ability to bring legal action seeking relief from the use of torture or cruel and inhumane treatment. And it implicitly authorizes the Department of Defense to consider evidence obtained through torture or other inhumane treatment in assessing the status of detainees held in Guantánamo Bay.

Tom Malinowski, HRW's Washington Advocacy Director, said, "If the McCain law demonstrates to the world that the United States really opposes torture, the Graham-Levin amendment risks telling the world the opposite." It's understandable that a non-partisan human rights organization would want to squeeze all they could out of McCain's supposed opposition to torture. But Malinowski was pointing to what a fraud the DTA was in terms of banning torture again.

In the end, McCain's alleged opposition to the torture policy has been as phony as Iraqi WMD's. Which fable, by the way, the Straight Talker promoted in support of his favorite project, the Iraq War. Dan Nowicki and Bill Muller reported in The Arizona Republic, The 'maverick' and President Bush 03/01/07:

Speaking Oct. 10, 2002, on the Senate floor, McCain called Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein "a megalomaniacal tyrant whose cruelty and offense to the norms of civilization are infamous." Saddam's government, McCain warned, "is a clear and present danger to the United States of America."

McCain demanded Saddam's removal during the debate over the Iraq war resolution:

"He has developed stocks of germs and toxins in sufficient quantities to kill the entire population of the earth multiple times. He has placed weapons laden with these poisons on alert to fire at his neighbors within minutes, not hours, and has devolved authority to fire them to subordinates. He develops nuclear weapons with which he would hold his neighbors and us hostage. (my emphasis)

Yep, that's our Maverick!

And, yes, that kind of horse-pooh passes for "straight talk" among our sad excuse for a national press corps.

Tags: iraq war, mccain, torture