This is nonsense. The evidence that McCain was tortured is at least as good and generally better than the evidence accepted every day that others are tortured. If you doubt McCain was tortured then you must also doubt prisoners at Guantanamo Bay were/are tortured.
[WS:] Obviously, none of us knows for sure one way or the other. All I am saying that we have words of a US military man with presdidential ambition vs words of a Vietnamese ex-prison guard with unknown motives. I personally see no reason to belive the former over the latter. Moreover, it is quite reasonanble to believe that McCain had many good reasons to exaggerate his conditions in Vietnamese captivity - from exonerating his own "collaboration with the enemy" to providing propaganda fodder, and to casting himself in a war hero role.
What is more, I do not see how Vietnamese prison and Guantanamo are similar. The Vietnememese kept known and clearly identified foreign soldiers who clealry crossed the borders of ther country to attack civilian and military targets. It is a fact nobody can reasonably deny. Guantanamo holds civlians captured in their native countries whom the US authorieties accuse - without any legal proof - of aiding "terrorists," again a very vague term, or posing a "threat" to vaguely defined "national security." The Vietnamese had every internationally recognized right to keep the US soldiers as POW, but of course not to torture them.. However, whether they were actually tortured or merely subjected to harsh conditiions is often a matter of interpretation. The US, by contrast, has no internatioally or even domestically recognized right to keep Guantanamo prisoners, yet they do depite US court orders. That very fact constitutes torture, even if
there were no waterboarding, which US admitted using.
Wojtek
--------------------------------------------------------------- "When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental — men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost. [...] All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men." - HL Mencken ----------------------------------------------------------------