Former congressman Fred Thompson was lying outright when he talked of the time John McCain spent as a POW.
While we shouldn't disparage McCain's service, I believe that for the security on our country and the sake of our troops in harm's way, we should at the very minimum tell the truth about him. Fred Thompson had a specific political agenda in mind when he lied about the North Vietnamese never breaking John McCain's spirit. The truth about the torture of John McCain is actually non-political.
In McCain's own words:
"I had learned what we all learned over there," McCain said. "Every man has his breaking point. I had reached mine."
To his credit, John McCain has publicly admitted that after 4 days of torture, he broke and signed a "confession" that said America was the aggressor and had no right to bomb Hanoi.
This isn't about his breaking under torture. It's about his poor judgment, reflected by his vote and his action after having been broken by torture. Because after all the lip service he paid in town hall meetings across America, Senator McCain not only voted Against the Dem's bill to stop torture by the CIA and to limit all interrogations to conform to the Military Uniform Code of Justice, he publicly supported Bush's veto of that bill after it passed.
More than any Senator, John McCain knows that torture is only reliable for producing propaganda for the torturer. And producing propaganda is specifically why he voted to grant the CIA the right to use torture on the authorization of President Bush.