Even though I disagree with Arizona Senator John McCain on nearly every issue, I still consider him to be an American hero. This is a man who was a POW in Vietnam’s infamous Hanoi Hilton for five and a half years. This man knows what it’s like to be tortured simply because your country is at war with another nation.
So when John McCain speaks out on the topic of waterboarding or other methods that have been used on suspected terrorists, I think it behooves us to give his words greater weight than we do those of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, both of whom say waterboarding is legal (it isn’t) and, in Trump’s case, attempting to raise the bar by promising to do worse things than make a human being think he’s dying by drowning.
Earlier this week, Senator McCain took to the Senate floor and spoke his mind on what some of the 2016 GOP candidates have said in an effort to appear tough, remarking:
“It’s been so disappointing to see some presidential candidates on the campaign trail engaged in loose talk about reviving waterboarding and other inhumane interrogation techniques. It might be easy to dismiss this bluster as cheap campaign rhetoric, but these statements must not go unanswered because they mislead the American people about the realities of interrogation, how to gather intelligence, what it takes to defend our security and at the most fundamental level what we are fighting for as a nation.”
How true that statement is. And it needs to be repeated again and again, especially in a Presidential election year. Trump and Cruz probably don’t care what John McCain has to say on the matter, but were he to remain silent, he would be complicit in their shared madness and inhumanity.
I salute you, Senator McCain. Please never be afraid to call out the extremists in this country who love to talk but fail to consider the potential consequences of their hateful words.
Here’s Senator McCain reminding us all why torture is wrong, no matter the situation:
This article was originally published by the same author at BipartisanReport.com.