McCain's right: The U.S. has no room for torture

• Following a December report on torture%2C a group of senators has introduced an anti-torture amendment
• Waterboarding still has defenders%2C who claim its use did not meet the legal definition of torture
• Obama threatens to veto the defense bills because they add %2438 billion to the defense budget

When Senate Democrats released their 525-page report summary in December on the CIA's use of torture during interrogations, critics accused the Dems of using their final days in the Senate majority to take partisan shots at the spy agency.

When the then-chairman of the Senate select committee on intelligence, Dianne Feinstein, said the four-year investigation revealed a "stain on our values and our history," many of those same critics said Feinstein was seeking vengeance against an agency with which she often had clashed.

But when Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona spoke almost those same words — using torture, he said, "stained our national honor, did much harm and little good" — the critics had little left to say.

No one in Congress is more of an authority on the use of brutality to extract information from a helpless prisoner than John McCain.

If the former prisoner of war of the North Vietnamese judges the CIA's actions to be both inhumane and counterproductive, then they simply are.

A bipartisan group of senators — captained, again, by McCain and Feinstein — has proposed an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act to prohibit so-called enhanced interrogation techniques. The only allowable techniques would be those found in the Army Field Manual, such as deception, isolation and the silent treatment.

Infamous techniques, including waterboarding, sleep deprivation, exposing prisoners to extended periods of cold with little or no clothing and electric shock, would be formally banned.

The amendment would make permanent an executive order signed by President Barack Obama in 2009.

Waterboarding still has its defenders. Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz., has been a persistent critic of the Democratic report and clings to the belief that the forbidden techniques do not meet the legal definition of torture. Others, including former President George W. Bush, still claim the information gleaned from the techniques saved American lives and helped weaken al-Qaida.

McCain has argued, persuasively, to the contrary.

In his impassioned Dec. 9 speech following the release of the report, McCain argued that using the techniques "actually damaged our security interests" because of the damage they did to the nation's reputation as a force for good in the world.

"I know from personal experience that the abuse of prisoners will produce more bad than good intelligence," McCain said then. "I know that victims of torture will offer intentionally misleading information if they think their captors will believe it.

"I know they will say whatever they think their torturers want them to say if they believe it will stop their suffering."

Despite the president's passionate support for the interrogation reforms, Obama has threatened to veto the defense-spending authorization act, as well as the appropriations bill, because the defense budget borrows $38 billion from a non-Pentagon account. Obama opposes any increase in defense spending that is not accompanied by an equal increase in domestic spending.

This is Washington politics at its puniest. The president is doing what he so often condemned the Republicans in Congress of doing — holding hostage the business of government in service of his pet priorities.

Making clear to the world that the U.S. does indeed consider torture to be torture has a value far higher than $38 billion.

Let's wipe clean this stain. Make it formal. Pass this act.