Has McCain Flip-Flopped on Torture?

[maddezmom]

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Dean's statement, distributed in a press release, was a political attack meant to raise questions among independent voters. And as with most political attacks, it turned a grain of truth into a misleading landslide of overheated accusation. A review of the record shows that McCain has neither changed his position on torture nor taken sides with President Bush on the substance of the issue. But at a time when new details are emerging of the Administration's intimate involvement with formulating specific detainee interrogation practices, the Arizona Senator does now find himself in the uncomfortable position of agreeing with President Bush on a key election-year vote about those very same controversial policies.

At issue is a Democratic proposal to require the U.S. intelligence community to limit its interrogation techniques to those contained in a military training book, called the Army Field Manual. Several Democrats who have received classified briefings on the current CIA interrogation program have said that the U.S. continues to approve of methods that they believe to be immoral and illegal. The CIA will not discuss the methods, except to say that waterboarding, a form of simulated drowning historically considered to be illegal, is no longer employed.

McCain has long argued that the Bush Administration overstepped its legal authority by approving techniques like waterboarding, and has successfully championed two efforts to try to limit the White House to the plain language of international treaties, which ban cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. McCain has also spoken in opposition to other techniques in the CIA arsenal like sleep deprivation and the use of stress positions, both of which were employed by the North Vietnamese during McCain's captivity as a prisoner of war and may still be employed by the CIA.

But on this latest piece of legislation, which arose during the heat of the primary campaign and may surface again later this month, McCain sided with Bush in opposing a further restriction of CIA techniques. Despite the claims of some partisans, McCain's decision was not a flip-flop, but rather the continuation of a position he took in 2005 when he first championed a bill to restrict the Bush Administration's ability to mistreat detainees.

more:http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1729891,00.html?xid=rss-topstories