McCain Takes Firm Stand on Waterboarding

I don’t give a damn what the president of the United States wants to do. We will not waterboard. We will not torture people… It doesn’t work.

— Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), issuing a fiery warning to President-elect Donald Trump on the subject of torture, Politico reports. Anyone who tries to resume torture, McCain said would find themselves in court “in a New York minute.”

The Terrorists Are Winning: Polls Find Growing Support for America As a Torture State

Scene from the Tokyo Trials in 1946 in which Japanese officials were tried for war crimes, including waterboarding  -  seven officials were sentenced to execution
Scene from the Tokyo Trials in 1946 in which Japanese officials were tried for war crimes, including waterboarding – seven officials were sentenced to execution

In its report on the torturing of terrorist suspects by the U.S. government during the Bush-Cheney administration, the Senate Intelligence Committee revealed a long list of abuses:

Detainees were forced to stand on broken limbs for hours, kept in complete darkness, deprived of sleep for up to 180 hours, sometimes standing, sometimes with their arms shackled above their heads.

Prisoners were subjected to “rectal feeding” without medical necessity. Rectal exams were conducted with “excessive force.” The report highlights one prisoner later diagnosed with anal fissures, chronic hemorrhoids and “symptomatic rectal prolapse.”

The report mentions mock executions, Russian roulette. U.S. agents threatened to slit the throat of a detainee’s mother, sexually abuse another and threatened prisoners’ children. One prisoner died of hypothermia brought on in part by being forced to sit on a bare concrete floor without pants.

In a facility codenamed COBALT, but referred to as the “Dungeon,” the United States created a chamber of horrors:

[…]

Cheney Still Maintains Waterboarding is Not Torture

If he doesn’t think that was torture, I would invite him anywhere in the United States to sit in a waterboard and go through what those people went through, one of them 100-plus-odd times.

— Sen. Angus King (I-ME), in an interview on MSNBC, on Vice President Cheney defending the “enhanced interrogation techniques” used by the CIA under the Bush administration.