Newsmax: Torture WORKS! Just look at John McCain!

(Via Atrios and The Rude Pundit).

We know that many Republicans have a soft spot for torture, while a number of others such as John McCain -- who as a torture victim and war hero has unique moral authority on the subject -- have campaigned against it.  McCain, in particular, has argued, as have many of us, that torture is not only morally wrong, corrosive of our souls, and poisonous to our reputation in the world, but is also useless as a means of obtaining information.  We object to a great deal of what Sen. McCain has said and done in politics, but he deserves applause for his uncompromising stance on this crucial issue.

Now here is a new wrinkle in the debate -- and, dare I say it, perhaps a new low!  The right-wing and loyally Republican NewsMax website has now argued that McCain's argument about the effectiveness of torture is wrong -- because torture did work -- against John McCain!   Here's a link to the article, but rather than give them the hits, you might just read the Rude Pundit's blistering summary.

The article quotes a couple of passages from McCain's autobiography.  In one, he indicates that he finally told his Vietnamese interrogators what the target of him bombing mission was, and felt guilty even though there was no strategic value in the information simply because US military rules forbid him from saying anything other than name, rank and serial number.  In the other, he describes signing a false confession.  Both, of course, followed extensive brutal torture.

So -- this is now the argument of our adversaries?  The Viet Cong did it, and it worked for them, so that's good enough for us?  This seems to me to be even worse than James Inhofe's argument that we shouldn't criticize American torturers because they're not as bad as Saddam's torturers ("I would guess that these prisoners wake up every morning thanking Allah that Saddam Hussein is not in charge of these prisons").  That implied that Saddam was the standard against which we are measuring ourselves, and our goal is to be better than that.  The new GOP talking point seems to be that the VC are our standard -- and our goal is to learn from them and their success.  How proud the writers at NewsMax are to be Americans!

Do they even notice that the usefulness of the information the torturers obtained from McCain is, by the very passages they cite, just about zero? McCain points out that the information on the target of his long-past bombing run would be of no help to them -- and the second piece of information he gave them was a false confession!.  Is this the GOP vision for what our intelligence services should be doing?

Mmmm, perhaps it is.  Atrios points out that in the al-Libi case torture was used to get an Iraqi informant to spin some lies that would be helpful in building the Bush administration's case for the Iraq war, lies that the interrogators knew were probably lies, and lies that Colin Powell repeated as fact before the world at the UN.

Thanks, NewsMax, for making it just that much clearer just what so many Republicans want our new torture regime to do.  Remember the new talking point:

Torture WORKS!