Must-read: The case against torture

It's fascinating to think how different the world would be had Al Gore been elected president back in 2000. Would we be anywhere near Iraq right now? Would global warming be on the national agenda? Would 9/11 have even occurred?

But an even more interesting question for this moment is what the world would be like if Sen. John McCain (pictured in a Hanoi hospital) had secured the Republican nomination in 2000 and become president. Over the years, McCain has proven himself to be a decent, reasonable man. On issues ranging from health care to gun control, he has been a voice of moderation and compromise. Although something of a hawk on national security, it's hard to imagine that the war in Iraq would have been fought as it has been or even at all under a McCain administration.

One thing that would certainly be different is our government's policy on torture. McCain, a victim of torture himself, knows how reprehensible and impractical the use of torture is. He lays it out beautifully right here. Money quote:

To prevail in this war we need more than victories on the battlefield. This is a war of ideas, a struggle to advance freedom in the face of terror in places where oppressive rule has bred the malevolence that creates terrorists. Prisoner abuses exact a terrible toll on us in this war of ideas. They inevitably become public, and when they do they threaten our moral standing, and expose us to false but widely disseminated charges that democracies are no more inherently idealistic and moral than other regimes. This is an existential fight, to be sure. If they could, Islamic extremists who resort to terror would destroy us utterly. But to defeat them we must prevail in our defense of American political values as well. The mistreatment of prisoners greatly injures that effort.

John McCain is a man truly worthy of the presidency. Too bad George W. Bush and his sleazy benefactors deprived our nation of this man's leadership.