In a Washington Post op-ed on Thursday, McCain pushed back powerfully against those on the right, such as former Bush administration Attorney General Michael Mukasey, who suggest that information obtained through torture helped American forces to pinpoint bin Laden.

McCain writes:

I asked CIA Director Leon Panetta for the facts, and he told me the following: The trail to bin Laden did not begin with a disclosure from Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times. The first mention of Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti — the nickname of the al-Qaeda courier who ultimately led us to bin Laden — as well as a description of him as an important member of al-Qaeda, came from a detainee held in another country, who we believe was not tortured. None of the three detainees who were waterboarded provided Abu Ahmed’s real name, his whereabouts or an accurate description of his role in al-Qaeda. In fact, the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” on Khalid Sheik Mohammed produced false and misleading information.

He goes on to make a more personal point:

I know from personal experience that the abuse of prisoners … often produces bad intelligence because under torture a person will say anything he thinks his captors want to hear — true or false — if he believes it will relieve his suffering. Often, information provided to stop the torture is deliberately misleading.

As is well known, the senator was a prisoner of war in North Vietnam for more than five years, during which time he suffered both physical and psychological torture. In an account published in U.S. News in 1973, he explained that he had provided a false confession himself after reaching his “breaking point:”

They wanted a statement saying that I was sorry for the crimes that I had committed against North Vietnamese people and that I was grateful for the treatment that I had received from them. …

I held out for four days. Finally, I reached the lowest point of my 5½ years in North Vietnam. I was at the point of suicide, because I saw that I was reaching the end of my rope.

I said, O.K., I’ll write for them.

They took me up into one of the interrogation rooms, and for the next 12 hours we wrote and rewrote. The North Vietnamese interrogator, who was pretty stupid, wrote the final confession, and I signed it. It was in their language, and spoke about black crimes, and other generalities. It was unacceptable to them. But I felt just terrible about it. I kept saying to myself, “Oh, God, I really didn’t have any choice.” I had learned what we all learned over there: Every man has his breaking point. I had reached mine.

In a way, of course, this was inevitable. McCain’s transformation from every Democrat’s favorite Republican to reflexively anti-Obama ideologue has been well-chronicled. Some have argued that McCain is simply returning to his ideological roots; he was elected to Congress as a Goldwater conservative and actually voted against the Martin Luther King holiday in 1983, after all. Others have noted that he faced an imperative to move sharply to the right in order to survive J.D. Hayworth’s primary challenge this past summer.

The reality, as I’ve noted, is that McCain’s ideological shifts over the years seem to track closely with his grudges.

When he began running for president in 2000, don’t forget, his issue positions were uniformly conservative, with one exception: campaign finance reform, a crusade that put him at odds with some of the most powerful forces on the right, who rallied behind George W. Bush. The issue itself meant little to most voters, but the heat that it generated from the right signaled partisan and ideological disloyalty to the party base — and prompted Democrats to see McCain as refreshingly principled.

When the campaign ended, McCain by all measures felt personally wounded by the Bush campaign’s tactics and began drifting toward Bush’s Democratic enemies. This was the John McCain who opposed the Bush tax cuts, discovered environmentalism, lobbied for a strong patients’ bill of rights, partnered with Schumer, and flirted with switching parties (or waging a Teddy Roosevelt-style independent bid for president in 2004). Not coincidentally, his embrace of all of these new causes made life difficult for the man who’d beaten him in 2000, Bush.

Since the ’08 campaign, McCain has treated Obama roughly the same way. It’s not just that McCain opposed, say, the stimulus or healthcare reform; it’s that he established himself early on as one of the administration’s loudest, harshest and most unrelenting critics. And this posture continued long after McCain crushed Hayworth in last August’s primary — remember how bitterly McCain resisted efforts to end the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy all the way through December, when it was finally (and barely) voted down by the Senate? McCain’s transformation has clearly been about more than shoring up his standing on the right to avoid primary challenges.

The more interesting question is what this will mean for his legacy. As James Fallows noted in December, when McCain was fighting DADT repeal with all his might:

I have been trying to think of a comparable senior public figure who, in the later stages of his or her career, narrowed rather than broadened his view of the world and his appeals to history’s judgment. I’m sure there are plenty (on two minutes’ reflection, I’ll start with Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh), but the examples that immediately come to mind go the other way.

Interviewed on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” McCain said “the time has come” for Mubarak to work out a transition of power that “has the army, pro-democracy elements and others in a transition government.”

“The best opportunity for a pro-democracy government and not a radical, Islamic government is an open, transparent process,” the senator said. “This virus spreading through the Middle East proves the human yearnings, and probably the only place you won’t see the demonstrations is Iraq.”

Speaking of annoying, this “news” was sort of broken by Mark Halperin, though Salter has not confirmed it. (And why would he? The book has not been well-reviewed.)

There were some clues. Mark Salter fancies himself a literary type. He ghost-wrote John McCain’s various books. “O’s” opponent in the book is an honorable military type with no glaring and obvious personal flaws. (It is sort of McCain plus Romney, I guess. I have only skimmed it.) A Democrat might’ve written a book more critical of the way the Republican Party runs campaigns.

In a summer New York magazine story partially about how nu-John McCain has disappointed the man who crafted his modern public persona, we’re told Salter retreated to Maine, to stew in his bitterness and “try his hand at writing fiction.” But the Daily Beast claimed that Mark Salter would not write a thinly veiled novel about the 2008 campaign, because he has writer’s block.

Mark Salter, John McCain’s co-author, and the man most credited with helping him shape his image as an iconic American hero—a maverick willing to buck orthodoxy in the name of principle (an image that McCain is in the process dismantling in his bitter primary fight)—has scrapped his plans to write fiction, and gone back to reality.

“I tried writing fiction after the ’08 campaign ended. I didn’t have the talent for it, and returned to more reliably lucrative speechwriting,” Salter told The Daily Beast in an email.
[...]
Salter said he “gave it up altogether because the kind of writers I admire have so much more talent than I do that it discouraged me from believing that I could write anything a tenth as good as they do.”

Right. Well, it’s not Joe Klein unambiguously denying authorship of “Primary Colors,” but it’s still funny.