McCain: U.S. MPs Acted Like 'Gestapo'

In some of the most incendiary criticism yet of the Iraqi prison abuse scandal, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., is comparing U.S. mistreatment of detained Iraqi terror suspects to the kind of tactics employed by Adolf Hitler's "Gestapo" police.

Warning against taking the scandal too lightly, McCain told radio host Don Imus on Tuesday, "If you go down that slippery slope, OK - you decide, OK, well, this torture is OK - then what's the difference between us and the Gestapo?"

Before invoking the specter of the Third Reich's brutal police units, the Arizona Republican denounced the notion that some of the abuse might have been justified as a legitimate interrogation tactic.

"What you're saying is that the end justifies the means," he told Imus. "That's not a Judeo-Christian-Islamic-principled way of treating human beings."

The top Senate Republican explained:

"The reason why we have these rules of war is because we have determined over the years that nations such as ours have got to treat these people with the dignity they deserve because they are human beings."

McCain then followed with his Gestapo comparison.

When Imus countered that "having a pair of women's underwear pulled over your head was better than having your fingernails pulled out by a pair of pliers," the former Vietnam War POW replied:

"Oh, absolutely. But, as I say, I worry about it being a slippery slope and I also hear rumors of things that were worse than that."

When Imus pressed on the distinction between humiliation and torture, McCain insisted, "Humiliation is one of those [tactics] that is prohibited, as far as my reading is concerned."

He concluded:

"The fundamental point here [is] we distinguish ourselves from our enemies by our treatment of our enemies. And if we engaged in the same kind of abuses that they did, then we're no longer any different from them."

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