It Ain’t Us
by digby
David Swanson at After Downing Street indicts the liberal blogosphere for failing to hold McCain accountable for his hypocrisy on torture. Speaking of the Pinochet meeting revealed on Huffington Post today, he writes:
First, it’s an opening to talk about McCain’s more recent support for torture, a topic Huffington Post, Daily Kos, and other liberal blogs have been no more open to than the New York Times or Fox News. In 2005 John McCain championed the McCain Detainee Amendment to the Defense Appropriations bill for 2005, which passed the Congress and was signed into law by Bush, adding one more redundant ban on torture to existing U.S. law, despite Vice President Cheney having lobbied hard against it. But McCain allowed a major loophole for the CIA and then kept quiet when Bush threw out the whole thing with a “signing statement.” Bush and Cheney’s administration continued to torture without pause or slowdown.
In 2006 Time Magazine recognized McCain’s efforts to supposedly ban torture in naming him one of America’s 10 Best Senators. Time made no mention of the fact that torture had always been illegal, the fact that Bush had thrown out the new law with a “signing statement,” or the fact that the United States was continuing to torture people on a large scale.
Also in 2006 McCain voted in favor of the Military Commissions Act which supposedly left torture decisions up to the president. And in February 2008, McCain voted against a bill that would supposedly ban torture, and then applauded Bush for vetoing the bill. I’ve talked to plenty of torture fans at McCain-Palin rallies. They know they’re backing the torture ticket. Why won’t even the independent progressive media admit it?
I’m on his mailing list and he sent this to me. But obviously, he doesn’t read my blog or any number of others who have been railing about McCain’s deplorable record on torture for years. It’s as great a mystery and frustration to me as it is him that the mainstream media have refused to look at this story, but it’s not because I the blogosphere hasn’t tried to get it out there.
I don’t mean to pick on Swanson. I get emails all the time from people excoriating me for failing to write about things I have been writing about for years. I normally just ignore it, assuming they don’t read my blog, but in this case, I wrote about it just last week, so I’m a little bit irritated.
And aside from own fevered meanderings, it is useful to point out that Glenzilla wrote a whole book about conservative hypocrisy and devoted substantial ink to this very topic:
The mirage-like nature of McCain’s alleged convictions can be seen most clearly, and most depressingly, with his public posturing over the issue of torture. Time and again, McCain has made a dramatic showing of standing firm against the use of torture by the United States, only to reveal that his so-called principles are confined to the realm of rhetoric and theater, but never action that follows through on that rhetoric.
In 2005, McCain led the effort in the Senate to pass the Detainee Treatment Act (DTA), which made the use of torture illegal. While claiming that he had succeeded in passing a categorical ban on torture, however, McCain meekly accepted two White House maneuvers that diluted his legislation to the point of meaningless: (1) the torture ban expressly applied only to the U.S. military, but not to the intelligence community, which was exempt, thus ensuring that the C.I.A.–the principal torture agent for the United States — could continue to torture legally; and (2) after signing the DTA into law, which passed the Senate by a vote of 90-9, President Bush issued one of his first controversial “signing statements” in which he, in essence, declared that, as president, he had the power to disregard even the limited prohibitions on torture imposed by McCain’s law.
McCain never once objected to Bush’s open, explicit defiance of his cherished anti-torture legislation, preferring to bask in the media’s glory while choosing to ignore the fact that his legislative accomplishment would amount to nothing. Put another way, McCain opted for the political rewards of grandstanding on the issue while knowing that he had accomplished little, if anything, in the way of actually promoting his “principles.”
A virtual repeat of that sleight-of-hand occurred in 2006, when McCain first pretended to lead opposition to the Military Commissions Act (MCA), only thereafter to endorse this most radical, torture-enabling legislation, almost single-handedly ensuring its passage. After insisting that compelled adherence to the anti-torture ban of the Geneva Conventions was a nonnegotiable item for him, McCain ultimately blessed the MCA despite the fact that it left it to the president to determine, in his sole discretion, which interrogation methods did or did not comply with the Conventions’ provisions.
Thus, once again, McCain created a self-image as a principled torture opponent with one hand, and with the other, ensured a legal framework that would not merely fail to ban, but would actively enable, the president’s ability to continue using interrogation methods widely considered to be torture.
That was excerpted from Huffington Post, btw.
Swanson is correct that the mainstream media have allowed McCain’s reputation as a moral agent on the subject of torture to stand. Even Obama unfortunately granted him that in the last debate. But those of us who follow civil liberties issues in the blogosphere have not and it’s galling to be accused of it.
I won’t link to all the posts on this subject from bloggers such as Kagro X at DKos, Christie Hardin Smith, Emptywheel, Think Progress, Crooks and Liars etc. Mr Google will take you there. We’ve done our best to expose McCain’s outrageous cowardice on this. Perhaps it’s such an enormous betrayal of principle that the political establishment can’t wrap their minds around it, I don’t know. But it’s out there if anyone wants to find it.
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