Shorter Skemono: Rush Limbaugh is a Big, Fat, Idiot

So Rush Limbaugh seems to believe that McCain "admitted torture worked on him". Originally, this was reported by NewsMax.com, who cited two things McCain said: one in which he eventually gave to the Vietnamese true information that was of no use (his ship's name and squadron number), or else lied to them, as recounted in his autobiography:

Once we were instructed to write summaries of our military histories. We invented all the details. Mine contained references to service in Antarctica and as a naval attaché in Oslo, two places, I am sorry to say, I had never visited. [Page 203]

[...]

Once I was instructed to draw a diagram of an aircraft carrier. I decided to comply with the order, but took considerable artistic license in the process. I drew a picture of a ship's deck with a large swimming pool on the fantail, the captain's quarters in a chain locker, and various other imagined embellishments.

Vietnamese propaganda about the soft, luxurious life that upper-class Westerners (a social class to which military officers were naturally thought to belong) made the interrogators easy marks for a lot of the b.s. we devised to avoid giving them any useful information. [Page 222]

The second example NewsMax cites is when McCain was beaten until he eventually signed a confession:

McCain was taken to an interrogation room and ordered to sign a document confessing to war crimes. "I signed it," he recalled. "It was in their language, and spoke about black crimes, and other generalities."

Those "other generalities" involve crimes that he never committed:

An interrogator had edited my last draft and decided to rewrite most of it himself. He then handed it to me and told me to copy it out in my own hand. I started to print in block letters, and he ordered me to write in script. He demanded that I add an admission that I had bombed a school. I refused, and we argued back and forth about the confession's contents for a time before I gave in to his demand. Finally, they had me sign the document. [Pages 243-244]

So there you have it. The right wing believes that torture gets good intelligence because it can be used to make people admit to things they didn't do, or couldn't possibly know.

After all, it worked to get Bush his pet war.