Daily Santorum: McCain torture spat

Rick Santorum's views on torture enhanced interrogation are well known: He's for it and he thinks it led to Osama Bin Laden. The second point is debatable at best, though it's not news for Santorum to endorse waterboarding of bearded Arabs. But boy did Our Rick step in it yesterday when, on Hugh Hewitt's radio show, he took on fellow Republican and torture victim John McCain, who has stated that CIA reports confirm waterboarding did not produce good intel (emphasis added):

Hewitt: Now your former colleague, John McCain, said look, there’s no record, there’s no evidence here that these methods actually led to the capture or the killing of bin Laden. Do you disagree with that? Or do you think he’s got an argument?

Santorum: I don’t, everything I’ve read shows that we would not have gotten this information as to who this man was if it had not been gotten information from people who were subject to enhanced interrogation. And so this idea that we didn’t ask that question while Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was being waterboarded, he doesn’t understand how enhanced interrogation works. I mean, you break somebody, and after they’re broken, they become cooperative. And that’s when we got this information. And one thing led to another, and led to another, and that’s how we ended up with bin Laden. That seems to be clear from all the information I read. Maybe McCain has better information than I do, but from what I’ve seen, it seems pretty clear that but for these cooperative witnesses who were cooperative as a result of enhanced interrogations, we would not have gotten bin Laden.

Once this hit the Interwebs, it was another "Rick says something kooky" day, and the condemnations were swift. Salon notes that McCain himself falsified information while being tortured, according to his memoir, so he knows a little something about how it works. McCain alter ego Mark Salter went on a Facebook diatribe that included this gem: "For pure, blind stupidity, nobody beats Santorum. In my 20 years in the Senate, I never met a dumber member, which he reminded me of today."

But the most cutting remark was from McCain's spokeswoman, who wrote a response that probably hurt attention-starved Santorum more than anything else in reply to a query from Washington Post blogger Greg Sargent: "Who?"

As the manure maelstrom gathered, Santorum spokeswoman Virginia Davis offered a clarification from Rick to reporters who asked:

I disagree with Senator McCain's view that the enhanced interrogation techniques used on a select few high-value terrorist detainees were unsuccessful nor do I believe they amounted to torture. For anyone to infer my disagreement with Senator McCain's policy position lessens my respect for his service to our country and all he had to endure is outrageous and unfortunate.

Remember that word "outrageous." You're going to hear it again as long as Santorum is in this thing.

The Schedule: No public appearances on the docket today.

Above: Hey Torquemada, whaddya say? Mel Brooks depicting a kinder, gentler era of torture, the Spanish Inquisition.