McCain: depths of dishonor

Tim Dickinson at Rolling Stone has dug through the nooks and crannies of John McCain's biography and drawn a frightening profile of a spoiled brat who never grew up, but pursues boundless ambitions with a child's selfishness and disregard for inconvenient people and realities.

The whole article is worth reading -- but since this blog has been following the development of the U.S. torture regime, I want to pass on what Dickerson writes on that topic.

Then there's torture -- the issue most related to McCain's own experience as a POW. In 2005, in a highly public fight, McCain battled the president to stop the torture of enemy combatants, winning a victory to require military personnel to abide by the Army Field Manual when interrogating prisoners. But barely a year later, as he prepared to launch his presidential campaign, McCain cut a deal with the White House that allows the Bush administration to imprison detainees indefinitely and to flout the Geneva Conventions' prohibitions against torture.

What his former allies in the anti-torture fight found most troubling was that McCain would not admit to his betrayal. Shortly after cutting the deal, McCain spoke to a group of retired military brass who had been working to ban torture. According to [Colonel Lawrence] Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former deputy, McCain feigned outrage at Bush and Cheney, as though he too had had the rug pulled out from under him. "We all knew the opposite was the truth," recalls Wilkerson. "That's when I began to lose a little bit of my respect for the man and his bona fides as a straight shooter."

John McCain, famous P.O.W. and torture victim, enabled torture for his personal political profit.