Republican Arizona Sen. John McCain, one of the few conservative backers of the release of the Senate’s so-called torture report, said Sunday that defenders of extreme interrogation techniques were conducting a “rewriting of history.”
“You can’t claim that tying someone to the floor and have them freeze to death is not torture,” McCain said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” “You can’t say 183 times someone is waterboarded — and, by the way, on waterboarding, it began with the Spanish Inquisition. It was done during the Philippines War. We tried and hung Japanese war criminals for waterboarding Americans in World War II.”
McCain, perhaps the most vocal critic of the Obama administration’s national security policies, is giving the White House some rare political cover on an issue that will dominate the Washington debate heading into 2015.
The former Republican presidential candidate also disputed the idea that making the report public would create more American enemies overseas.
“Frankly, this idea that somehow this is gonna make our enemies more likely to attack us, I don’t think so,” he said. “They’re beheading Americans right now. So that part of it, I dismiss. But what we need to do is come clean. We move forward. And we vow never to do it again.”
