What he said

Wretchard on the anti-torture McCain amendment:

What the McCain Amendment will do is change the bean-counting rules. It will not create a framework in which real torture can be limited and stopped. That would require accepting moral responsibility for affirming practices which may be proscribed under the Geneva Conventions but fall short of real torture. That would mean explaining to the public that we are correspondingly determined to outlaw real, barbaric torture, even when by foreswearing it, public losses must be endured. Instead politicians will want to have it both ways and promise the public that they will neither soil their hands nor let the sleeping populace come to harm. No one who desires re-election can promise the voters only "blood, sweat and tears". The time is long since past when politicians could say to a nation at war "death and sorrow will be the companion of our journey; hardship our garment; constancy and valor our only shield." That's too much of a drag. Today even our conflicts, like our food, must be untouched by human hands.

It will effectively rule out the use of drugs, sleep deprivation and threat, which arguably should not be classed as torture and make these methods unavailable for interrogation. When taken together with the public clamor to provide nearly 100% protection against terrorist attack, it will create a heightened demand for information which cannot be met, even partially, by practices which fall short of real torture but which exceed the restrictions of international conventions. That need will be filled instead by a black market for coercion organized by a variety of non-American entities for whom the rules do not apply, nor were ever expected to apply, for "we are better than our enemies"; and one might add, better than our friends.