Yesterday McCain called out Giuliani for equivocating on waterboarding, making the mayor seem exactly like the mayor— that is, like someone who will happily prattle on no matter how head fogged by politics and ideology and wishful thinking he may be on a topic.

McCain has served in the military and has, alone among the candidates, been tortured, being held in captivity in a Vietnamese prison for five long damned years. He’s the only Republican candidate for president who speaks with any kind of authority on the matter. The rest apparently believe talking Hollywood BS about torturing terrorist suspects makes them sound tough, which is pathetic, I mean the very idea that they would prefer to sound like Jack Bauer rather than John McCain. Think about that for a minute.

“All I can say is that waterboarding was used in the Spanish Inquisition, in Pol Pot’s genocide in Cambodia, and reportedly against protesting monks in Burma today,” said McCain, deadpan. If Giuliani is at all “unsure” whether waterboarding constitutes torture, he continued, then the tough guy / War on Terror candidate simply doesn’t know what waterboarding is: “It’s not a complicated procedure. It’s torture.”

Sounding just like the president and his administration’s discredited team of lawyers, Giuliani said he was in favor of “aggressive questioning.” Is waterboarding part of that, is it torture? a reporter in Iowa asked in response. “It depends on how it’s done,” said Giuliani, the sudden expert, as if he would be there to supervise, to open a window and turn on a fan and count the minutes before personally removing a wet rag from a suspect’s mouth, as if he had been intimate with various forms of waterboarding in the past, like in his fantasy life as Mayor Jack Bauer. “It all depends on circumstance. It depends on who does it,” he continued, out loud, for everyone to hear, worse than any nonstop stream-of-conscious New York City taxi driver, embarrassing pretty much the entire planet.

McCain and most all military and civilian experts agree that torture does not work, despite what experts in the world of pundit-tainment like Ann Coulter think. Victims of torture of course just say anything to stop the pain. Torture only serves to degrade the victim and the perpetrator. Yet, except for McCain, the Republican candidates agree that they would use aggressive or “coercive interrogation techniques” in the War on Terror, which is nothing more than a tough-sounding version of cowardly mincing of words. Which is it? Are you in favor of torture or not? (Or do we have to torture it out of you?) Tough is not dodging the question. How macho is it really to advance torture in this way, tacitly, so as to avoid taking legal responsibility? There’s a court in the Hague that will test your toughness, Mr Giluiani, if you care to try your luck in the realm of history’s most despicable heads of state.

Is there any evidence, incidentally, that the Republican’s “coercive interrogation techniques,” if they are truly any different than torture, work any better than plucking eyeballs and suffocating people? What techniques are they talking about, exactly? Is there a list of these things? I’m sure there is. YouTubers— and even maybe some paid journalists— should ask Giuliani and the rest of the “coercive interrogator” candidates what they mean when they say those words and what evidence— the real kind not talk show theoreticals— they have to support their willing endorsement of such a break from American military tradition.

Later Giuliani joked with reporters that sleep deprivation wasn’t torture. “That’s plain silly. That’s silly,” he said. “On that theory, I’m getting tortured running for president,” which might explain why he’ll say pretty much anything.

Tags: giuliani, torture, waterboarding