Wages of sadism: In this week’s Newsweek cover story, Sen. John McCain weighs into the current fray surrounding whether, how and whether we should torture detainees, suspects or armed insurgents. His position is opposite that of pro-torturers George Bush and Dick Cheney, as one would expect from a man who was tortured for years by the Viet Cong while in captivity during the Vietnam War.

His reasoning is simple: torture is inhumane and so violates and denigrates our moral superiority in war, and it produces bad intelligence. Here are some of McCain’s main points:

• In my experience, abuse of prisoners often produces bad intelligence because under torture a person will say anything he thinks his captors want to hear—whether it is true or false—if he believes it will relieve his suffering.
• Mistreatment of enemy prisoners endangers our own troops who might someday be held captive.
• This is a war of ideas, a struggle to advance freedom in the face of terror in places where oppressive rule has bred the malevolence that creates terrorists. Prisoner abuses exact a terrible toll on us in this war of ideas.
• It is indispensable to our success in this war that those we ask to fight it know that in the discharge of their dangerous responsibilities to their country they are never expected to forget that they are Americans, and the valiant defenders of a sacred idea of how nations should govern their own affairs and their relations with others—even our enemies.

I hope McCain’s reasonable and moral argument will find traction in Congress and that his anti-torture bill will pass. But I fear that the sadists in charge are so dehumanized that they cannot stop the whip.