Rick Santorum: McCain Doesn't 'Get' Torture

Rick Santorum raised more than a few eyebrows yesterday when he said that John McCain “doesn’t understand how enhanced interrogation works.” Santorum was taking issue with McCain’s assertion, backed by a letter from Leon Panetta, that information gained under torture did not lead to Osama bin Laden’s death. “He doesn’t understand how enhanced interrogation works,” Santorum said in a radio interview, according to the AP. “I mean, you break somebody, and after they’re broken, they become cooperative.”

McCain, of course, was repeatedly tortured during his five and a half years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. When asked about Santorum’s comments, a McCain spokesman emailed the Washington Post a one-word response: “Who?” Santorum, meanwhile, tells Politico that he respects McCain’s “service to our country and all he had to endure,” but disagrees with him about the effectiveness of enhanced interrogation, which he does not believe “amounted to torture.” (More John McCain stories.)