“I believe that it is torture, very exquisite torture.”
- John McCainAfter John McCain became the undisputed frontrunner for the GOP nomination when he swept the board in the Potomac primaries on Tuesday, it took just two days for him to sell out his principles on torture in order to get the endorsements of blood-thirsty rightwingers among the House Republicans, as well as the previous all-time champion flipflopper, Mitt Romney.

First, here’s a trip down memory lane recalling the so-called straight-talking Maverick’s previous position against the use of torture techniques like waterboarding.

• John McCain writing in Newsweek on Nov. 21, 2005:
  

  [There] has been considerable press attention to a tactic called “waterboarding,” where a prisoner is restrained and blindfolded while an interrogator pours water on his face and into his mouth–causing the prisoner to believe he is being drowned. He isn’t, of course; there is no intention to injure him physically. But if you gave people who have suffered abuse as prisoners a choice between a beating and a mock execution, many, including me, would choose a beating. The effects of most beatings heal. The memory of an execution will haunt someone for a very long time and damage his or her psyche in ways that may never heal. In my view, to make someone believe that you are killing him by drowning is no different than holding a pistol to his head and firing a blank. I believe that it is torture, very exquisite torture.

• John McCain on Oct. 25, 2007:
  

  “All I can say is that it was used in the Spanish Inquisition, it was used in Pol Pot’s genocide in Cambodia, and there are reports that it is being used against Buddhist monks today,” Mr. McCain, who spent more than five years in a North Vietnamese prison camp, said in a telephone interview.

• John McCain, writing with Sen. Lindsey Graham to Attorney Gen. Michael Mukasey, on Nov. 9, 2007
  

  We appreciate your acknowledgement that waterboarding is “over the line” and “repugnant.” As we have previously noted, waterboarding, under any circumstances, represents a clear violation of U.S. law. In 2005, the President signed into law the so-called “McCain Amendment,” a prohibition on cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment as those terms are understood under the standards of the U.S. Constitution. We expressed then our strong belief that a fair reading of this legislation outlaws waterboarding and other extreme techniques.

• John McCain yesterday:
  

  “I’ve made it very clear that I believe that waterboarding is torture and illegal … But I will not restrict the CIA to only the army field manual. That’s my position, and that’s been my position, and the reason why we passed the [2006 standard].”

The measure McCain voted against yesterday states:

“No individual in the custody or under the effective control of an element of the intelligence community or instrumentality thereof, regardless of nationality or physical location, shall be subject to any treatment or technique of interrogation not authorized by the United States Army Field Manual on Human Intelligence Collector Operations.”

Andrew Sullivan, who has written admiringly of McCain’s anti-torture position in the past, describes himself as “heartbroken.”

“I simply cannot see any explanation for this except politics – that McCain feels the need to appease the Republican far right at this point in time … McCain has indeed been a leader in preventing the military from torturing terror suspects, and in banning waterboarding. But by leaving this lacuna in the law, he gives this president the space he wants. As president himself, of course, McCain would surely instruct the CIA to uphold the American way of interrogation, and not to adopt techniques once used by the Gestapo and prosecuted by the US as war crimes. But we now know that there will be one difference between Obama and McCain in November. One will never tolerate torture; the other just did.”

McCain’s flipflop on torture worked — at least in the short term. After he changed his position yesterday, he received the endorsement of such unprincipled extremist pols as Florida Rep. Adam Putman and the House GOP’s eternal war caucus, and of Romney, who accused Democrats of advocating “surrender” to terrorists but whose five sons are sitting out the so-called terror war stateside.