Honor/Dishonor

John McCain, the only member of the Senate known to have actually been tortured, speaks on the Senate torture report.  I wanted to include this in yesterday’s essay, but ran out of time.

“The truth is sometimes a hard pill to swallow,” [Mccain] said, standing at his desk on the Senate floor as Ms. Feinstein and other colleagues looked on. “It sometimes causes us difficulties at home and abroad. It is sometimes used by our enemies in attempts to hurt us. But the American people are entitled to it, nonetheless.”

He called waterboarding “an exquisite form of torture” and “shameful.” The C.I.A.’s techniques, he said, “stained our national honor, did much harm and little practical good.”

…“I know from personal experience that the abuse of prisoners will produce more bad than good intelligence,” he said. “I know that victims of torture will offer intentionally misleading information if they think their captors will believe it. I know they will say whatever they think their torturers want them to say if they believe it will stop their suffering.”

He closed by saying he believed the country gave up far more in honor than what it obtained in intelligence. “We need only remember in the worst of times, through the chaos and terror of war, when facing cruelty, suffering and loss, that we are always Americans, and different, stronger, and better than those who would destroy us.”