Update: Bush admin distorted McCain’s views on torture

UPDATE: Bush admin covered up McCain’s objections to sleep deprivation to provide legal cover for the practice

The Bush administration “misrepresented” Sen. John McCain’s views on torture in order to create a legal justification for the use of sleep deprivation on terrorist suspects, Time magazine reported Monday.

A newly declassified memo from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, written in 2007, states: “Several Members of Congress, including the full memberships of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees and Senator McCain, were briefed by General Michael Hayden, Director of the CIA, on the six techniques that we discuss herein. … In those classified and private conversations, none of the Members expressed the view that the CIA detention and interrogation program should be stopped, or that the techniques at issue were inappropriate.”

But “contrary to those claims, the Arizona Republican repeatedly raised objections in private meetings, including one with Hayden, about the use of sleep deprivation as an interrogation technique,” Time reports.

“Senator McCain clearly made the case that he was opposed to unduly coercive techniques, especially when used in combination or taken too far — including sleep deprivation,” Brooke Buchanan, a spokeswoman for McCain, told the magazine.

The news that McCain objected to the use of sleep deprivation “call[s] into question the legal conclusions that allowed harsh interrogation in late 2007,” Time reports, because under the Fifth Amendment, a punishment cannot be constitutional if it “shocks the conscience.”

Thus, if some members of Congress had expressed reservations about sleep deprivation, “the technique would have been illegal under the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, which applied constitutional standards to the treatment of CIA detainees,” Time reported.

“One thing is clear,” writes blogger Emptywheel at Firedoglake. “Someone at the CIA is still lying about its torture briefings to Congress.”

ORIGINAL STORY FOLLOWS BELOW

Sen. John McCain disagrees with former Vice President Dick Cheney’s claim that enhanced interrogation techniques helped keep the country safe.

“I think the interrogations were in violation of the Geneva Conventions and the convention against torture that we ratified under President Reagan,” McCain told CBS’ Bob Schieffer Sunday.

“I think these interrogations, once publicized, helped al Qaeda recruit. I got that from an al Qaeda operative in a prison camp in Iraq… I think that the ability of us to work with our allies was harmed. And I believe that information, according go the FBI and others, could have been gained through other methods,” said McCain.

McCain disagreed with Attorney General Holder’s decision to probe interrogation techniques that went beyond legal recommendations, saying he agreed with President Barack Obama that the country needs to “look forward,” not back.

“But the damage that [enhanced interrogation] did to America’s image in the world is something we’re still on the way to repairing,” added McCain. “This is an ideological struggle, as well as a physical one.”

Video of Sen. McCain’s appearance on Face the Nation follows below.

WILL: TRUTH COMMISSION NEEDED

Conservative columnist George Will has added his voice to those who are calling for a truth commission to investigate the use of enhanced interrogation techiniques.

“We ought to have a commission [as] Fred Hiatt in The Washington Post suggests this morning,” said Will.

“Khalid Sheikh Mohamed was reticent,” Will said. “He was waterboarded 183 times and became loquacious. Did that have something to do with that? And was he useful? Because whether or not these techniques are immoral, or how immoral they are, surely depends on whether they worked.”

Video at source