Former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum has stepped up to respond to John McCain’s recent denouncing of both waterboarding and the effort to claim that our torture program led to the killing of Bin Laden. Santorum told an interview that McCain, a torture survivor, just doesn’t understand interrogation and then gave a frightening defense of torture that would have made Pol Pot blush.

Santorum articulates his version of Dr. Strangelove’s “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb Torture.”

Here is the exchange:

Q: Now did the bin Laden killing cause you to hope that the enhanced interrogation debate returns center stage about whether or not, and when such techniques ought to be used?
RS: Well, not only that, but the first thing that should happen, Hugh, was that the President of the United States should have stepped forward and said we are going to stop this, well, potential prosecution of those within the intelligence community who were involved in the enhanced interrogation program. That should have been step one, going to Eric Holder and saying enough is enough, we’re not doing this anymore. We need to give these guys medals, not prosecute them. Number two, he should have stepped forward and said look, I was wrong, the enhanced interrogation program did work, it did produce my greatest foreign policy success. And I’m going to admit when I was wrong, and we’re going to look at how we’re going to redeploy this under obviously different rules and regulations, since of course the Obama administration told the enemy what we were doing in the previous enhanced interrogation programs.

Q: Now your former colleague, John McCain, said look, there’s no record, there’s no evidence here that these methods actually led to the capture or the killing of bin Laden. Do you disagree with that? Or do you think he’s got an argument?

RS: I don’t, everything I’ve read shows that we would not have gotten this information as to who this man was if it had not been gotten information from people who were subject to enhanced interrogation. And so this idea that we didn’t ask that question while Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was being waterboarded, he doesn’t understand how enhanced interrogation works. I mean, you break somebody, and after they’re broken, they become cooperative. And that’s when we got this information. And one thing led to another, and led to another, and that’s how we ended up with bin Laden. That seems to be clear from all the information I read. Maybe McCain has better information than I do, but from what I’ve seen, it seems pretty clear that but for these cooperative witnesses who were cooperative as a result of enhanced interrogations, we would not have gotten bin Laden.

So Santorum believes that torture is now the “first thing” that we should do with detainees and that we should embrace a practice defined as a war crime under treaties that we signed and enforced against others.

Santorum simply repeats the false assertion that, over the course of over 180 torture sessions, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed gave up the name of the courier that led to Bin Laden. It is not enough that the Director of the CIA denied that fact or that, under international law, it does not matter if torture works — it is still a war crime.

I am pretty sure McCain “understand[s] how enhanced interrogation works” from a unique perspective. Santorum was a toddler when McCain was being worked over in Vietnam.

Santorum’s new expertise on torture is wrapped up in the simplest terms: “I mean, you break somebody, and after they’re broken, they become cooperative.” Wow, that is insightful. I am not sure how McCain missed it. “You break somebody, and after they’re broken, they become cooperative.” While Santorum bills himself as the choice of the faithful for the White House, he offered the most amoral defense of torture that entirely ignores decades of struggle against war crimes. It is entirely consequentialist view of torture: if it works, it must be good.

The greatest irony is that Obama’s cynical calculus on torture has produced no positive returns. He has blocked any investigation or prosecution of Americans for torture but is still be accused of prosecuting CIA employees rather than “giving them medals.”

I am not sure where this is heading but it is not a good direction. Now, Gingrich and others will have to move even further to the right of Santorum. Certainly, no one can be to the left on the torture issue. Next we will hear Santorum does understand torture because he has not called for public torture events. Once you cross the moral Rubicon and embrace torture, there is a world of amoral opportunities.

Source: Washington Post

Jonathan Turley