Senator John McCain of Arizona, the 2008 GOP Presidential nominee, spent five and a half years in a North Vietnamese prison, and suffered horrible torture.
George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and other figures in the Bush Administration NEVER suffered torture, and neither did former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, who is one of the group of Republicans seeking the Presidency in 2012.
But the Bush loyalists and Senator Santorum continue to assert that waterboarding, a form of torture, helped to bring about the assassination of Osama Bin Laden two weeks ago, despite clearcut evidence from CIA head Leon Panetta that waterboarding had no role in bringing about the demise of Bin Laden.
Senator McCain had the courage last week to condemn those who think torture is an acceptable and useful method to gain information from detainees. McCain has always been against the breaking of international law which the Bush Administration was engaged in by using waterboarding as a method to try to force information from captives in the War on Terror.
If John McCain, who suffered for this country, and CIA head Leon Panetta, both claim that torture did not work, and undermines our values, that should be enough to stop the propaganda endorsing torture, and it is good that Barack Obama has repudiated such a policy in the future, as it diminished the image of the United States as a nation that exists under law and a sense of morality.