McCain “doesn’t understand” torture

The torture debate among second-tier GOP hopefuls continues, with a surprising choice of words from former Sen. Rick Santorum.

Check out this exchange between radio host Hugh Hewitt and Santorum (bold mine):

HH: 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 [McCain] 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.

McCain, you’ll remember, was tortured (or was it enhanced-interrogated?), and he has made it clear that torture played no role whatsoever in the capture and killing of Osama bin Laden. Santorum, a Catholic who supports the use of torture, obviously disagrees.

When McCain’s staff was asked for a reply to Santorum’s statement, they offered one word:

Who?

Michael J. O’Loughlin