Where does former Prisoner of War John McCain really stand on the issue of torture? Is the Republican presidential candidate in favor of the use of torture or against it?

When he was recently asked by Marie Claire magazine which celebrity he identifies with most, McCain said:

“Kiefer Sutherland. [laughs, imitates a voice from the show 24] ‘It’s Jack Bauer.’ We have a lot in common because he escapes all the time.”

However, when reminded of Jack Bauer’s use of torture in the show, McCain does a Hollywood Retake. He says:

“Yeah, that’s right. That’s where Jack and I disagree. He believes in torture, but I don’t. He says, “Tell me where the weapons are.” The person says, “I won’t.” Bam! “OK, I’ll tell.”

I’m not sure which is more disconcerting. McCain’s choice of Jack Bauer from 24 as the character he most identifies with. The fact that policymakers like McCain are actually influenced by fictional television characters. (Who said TV doesn’t affect the viewers?) Or maybe McCain’s choice of Bauer was a Freudian slip?

Yet…McCain’s record on torture belies another story. According to his voting record, McCain voted against a bill banning the use of waterboarding by the CIA. And after the bill passed, he asked Bush to veto it.

So, let’s ask the question again. Is McCain for or against torture? Here is a little refresher of McCain’s stance on torture back in February 2008, courtesy of MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDmBTmYhZ1E[/youtube]

While you were voting, phone banking, mastering delegate math or dodging a killer tornado in the Midwest, the Bush administration was busy finally admitting to and condoning torture.

CIA Director Michael Hayden chose stormy distracting Super Tuesday to concede for the record that the CIA used waterboarding to extract information from three Al Qaeda suspects. “In the most detailed public comments on a CIA program that had been shrouded in secrecy for years, Hayden said the agency had used simulated drowning to extract crucial information from terrorism suspects in 2002 and 2003,” reported The Los Angeles Times.

A day later, as campaign pundits tracked the delegate count, the Bush administration announced that waterboarding, which has been the subject of attorney general hearings and presidential debates, has been made legal. The L.A. Times quoted White House spokesman Tony Fratto saying waterboarding is legal and could be used “under certain circumstances.”

The Bush Administration and the Bush-era Justice Department have for years denied using torture and have hedged repeatedly on whether the CIA was given the green light to waterboard prisoners. During his confirmation hearing as Attorney General of the United States in November, five years into the War on Terror, Michael Mukasey said he couldn’t comment on waterboarding because he “didn’t know what was involved in the technique.” A citizen website went up in response to detail the technique for the Attorney General. It includes this description based on witness testimony and historical records:

Waterboarding induces panic and suffering by forcing a person to inhale water into the sinuses, pharynx, larynx, trachea, and lungs. The head is tilted back and water is poured into the upturned mouth or nose. Eventually the subject cannot exhale more air or cough out more water, the lungs are collapsed, and the sinuses and trachea are filled with water. The subject is drowned from the inside, filling with water from the head down. The chest and lungs are kept higher than the head so that coughing draws water up and into the lungs while avoiding total suffocation.

As John McCain said: “Anyone who knows what waterboarding is could not be unsure. It is a horrible torture technique used by Pol Pot and being used on Burmese Buddhist monks as we speak.”

The Washington Post has a great editorial on the debate on Friday, saying: “Waterboarding is, and always has been, torture…Congress must act now to put an end to the continued twisting of the law and fundamental American values. Lawmakers can do so by passing legislation requiring all U.S. interrogators to abide by the techniques authorized in the Army Field Manual, which military officials have said allows them the flexibility they need to gather intelligence.”

CIA Director Hayden, however, held that the CIA should not be constrained by the guidelines of the Army Field Manual. He said The CIA is not the Army, that agents follow a different dress and grooming code and that they should also be allowed to waterboard if they believe the situation calls for it. McCain and other military personnel have been horrified by such cavalier attitudes toward torture under the Bush Administration. They argue that such policy only turns back on the country in general and on U.S. soldiers in particular, undermining American standing around the world and bringing torture upon American POWs. “When I was imprisoned,” said McCain of his time as a POW in North Vietnam, “I took heart from the fact that I knew my North Vietnamese captors would never be treated by Americans the way I was being treated by them… There are much better and more effective ways to get information. You torture someone long enough, he’ll tell you whatever he thinks you want to know.”

I almost inserted an argument here about how this country needs to work on its international public diplomacy now more than ever, and that torturing foreigners ain’t the way to do it. But I’m not going to finish that thought. I shouldn’t have to. There is one reason and one reason alone that the United States should not torture people: it’s wrong.

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.