ThinkProgress filed this report from West Des Moines, Iowa.
GOP presidential hopeful and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum campaigned in Iowa yesterday after officially announcing his candidacy earlier this week. Santorum took press questions in West Des Moines during a visit to a “crisis pregnancy center” called Informed Choices that tries to talk women out of having abortions. Santorum has been criticized in recent weeks for saying that Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), a war veteran and torture survivor, “doesn’t understand” how torture works. McCain’s daughter subsequently blasted Santorum for his ignorant remarks, and McCain himself said that Santorum “made a mistake.” But yesterday, the former senator stood by his position and refused to apologize for his comment.
When ThinkProgress asked Santorum if he regretted his remarks, he became agitated and was clearly annoyed at being confronted about them. After claiming I was doing an injustice to his words by paraphrasing them, he reaffirmed his fundamental disagreement with McCain over “enhanced interrogation techniques”:
TP: John McCain recently said you made a mistake when you said he didn’t understand how torture works. Do you now regret making those statements?
SANTORUM: With all due respect, if you’re going to quote me, please quote me, don’t paraphrase and then put some sort of twist on what I said. I didn’t say that, and I think you should go back and you should read what I said. … What I said was we have a very different opinion on how the enhanced interrogation program works. I’ve been very clear about that. We still have that disagreement.
Watch it:
“He doesn’t understand how enhanced interrogation works,” the former Pennsylvania senator told Hewitt. “I mean, you break somebody, and after they’re broken, they become cooperative. And that’s when we got this information. And one thing led to another, and led to another, and that’s how we ended up with bin Laden.”
McCain was repeatedly subjected to torture during his more than five years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam.
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