President Bush intends to veto the ban on waterboarding contained in the recent intelligence bill. With McCain as the party’s nominee, the media’s all prepped up to misreport/mislead his stances.

 today will veto legislation meant to ban the CIA from using waterboarding and other harsh interrogation tactics and will argue that the agency needs to use tougher methods than the U.S. military to wrest information from terrorism suspects, administration officials said. …

Although long expected, Bush’s formal move to veto the bill reignites the Washington debate over the proper limits of the U.S. interrogation policies and whether the CIA has engaged in torture by subjecting prisoners to severe tactics, including waterboarding, a type of simulated drowning.

The issue also has potential ramifications for GOP presidential nominee John McCain (R-Ariz.), a longtime critic of coercive interrogation tactics who nonetheless backed the Bush administration in opposing the CIA waterboarding ban. The Democratic presidential candidates, Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) and Barack Obama (Ill.), both support the ban, though neither was present for last month’s Senate vote for the bill that Bush is to veto.

The legislation would have limited the CIA to using 19 less-aggressive tactics outlined in a U.S. Army field manual on interrogations. Besides ruling out waterboarding, that restriction would effectively ban temperature extremes, extended forced standing and other harsh methods that the CIA used on al-Qaeda prisoners after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

It’s a simple biased contrast, placing McCain as the man for torture while his betters, Clinton and Obama, support the ban. Except it’s entirely wrong.

McCain opposes waterboarding, as he’s said many times before. He supports the veto on the ban because he believes waterboarding is already illegal — not because he opposes a ban on it. He believes his legislation from a few years back already banned it, thus this new section of the intelligence bill is purposeless.

The second reason he opposes it is because he feels the section does more than limit waterboarding, but damages the CIA’s ability to collect intelligence. Ed writes:

First, the Army field manual applggies to a different set of circumstances than the CIA faces, primarily because the Army faces a different enemy in the field and has a much different mission than the CIA.  The AFM appropriately limits the actions of its interrogators, but it isn’t the ur-text of what constitutes and doesn’t constitute torture.  Just because a method doesn’t make it into the AFM doesn’t mean that it’s torture under international convention.

Secondly — and this can’t be said strongly enough — it is wildly inappropriate to publish the limits of interrogatory technique for the CIA.   That should be left to the imagination of our enemie, again for two reasons.  One, the publication allows our enemies to prepare themselves for the limit of the techniques published, making successful interrogation much more difficult to achieve.  Second, having the limits remain unknown allows fear of what might happen to make less-intensive techniques more effective.

McCain doesn’t oppose a ban on waterboarding, as the original article suggests. Instead, he opposes the advertising of our methods and believes waterboarding is, and he has helped make it, illegal.