by: Mitch Jeserich

“You and I just disagree and lets leave it at that,” John McCain yelled at me just outside the Senate chamber.

That’s how many of our conversations ended when I was a Capitol Hill reporter from 2003-2006. In this first interview with him I had asked, as a former prisoner of war in Vietnam, if he was concerned about holding people at Guantanamo Bay as “enemy combatants” and outside the jurisdiction of the Geneva Accords that set the international standard for treating prisoners of war.

“They are not prisoners of war,” he told me.

“But they were captured during war,” I said.

“No they weren’t captured…they were captured because they were intent on committing acts of terror and killing American citizens.”

I believe the path to torture began when the United States used this designation of enemy combatant. It is an extra-judicial category that gave the Bush administration full latitude on how to treat detainees while shielding itself from any meaningful oversight.

Arriving in Washington D.C. just months after the Iraq invasion, I too saw John McCain as a man of integrity who was willing to take on his own party and who was terribly maligned by Karl Rove through racist attacks against his adopted daughter during the 2000 Presidential campaign.

I naively assumed through his own experience as a POW he would push for every protection afforded to prisoners of war. To his credit, McCain held hearings on on torture once such stories came to light, grilled top Pentagon officials including Donald Rumsfeld and sponsored legislation to limit “enhanced interrogation” techniques. But McCain never called for an end to this designation of enemy combatant.

That was a shame because with his moral stature he could have single handedly forced the Bush administration to change course. Instead, 17 years later there are still people being held without a trial in Guantanamo and we now have a President who has vowed to fill it back up.

My question to McCain in 2003 wasn’t the first fuck you question I’ve ever asked a politician. I did it all the time when I was a state capitol reporter in California. But that was small potatoes and this was John McCain and I wasn’t sure when going home that night I’d be suddenly and extraordinarily renditioned to one of Gina Haspel’s little house of horrors in Thailand.

John McCain had good relations with both my predecessor and successor on the Hill. My predecessor told me McCain would tell him dirty jokes. I’ve seen photos of McCain doing face-time with the children of my successor. Both are great reporters. But McCain never looked happy when he saw me wheeling towards him. It is said you knew if he liked you or not and I knew he didn’t like me. Yet, to his credit, he always gave me time. And I was a little scared in approaching him too, I admit. But I was more afraid of the crazy and angry emails I’d get from Pacifica radio listeners if I wasn’t up in his grill.

The last time I talked to John McCain was after the election in January 2009. I was in D.C. to cover the first 100 days of the Obama administration for a pilot program called Letters from Washington that would turn into Letters & Politics. I was once again waiting outside the Senate chamber when John McCain saw me. He looked tired and beat up after his presidential run. I remember John Kerry looking the same after the 2004 election. McCain saw me, turned to me and shook my hand. He looked like, after everything he had been through, happy to see me again. Running for President must really suck, I thought.