Despite his “straight talk” speeches, Sen. John McCain, the frontrunner in the Republican race for the presidential nominee, has failed in reforming U.S. torture policy. Though the senator has renounced the practice of waterboarding in the past, when met with the opportunity to ban the technique and put tangible action to his anti-torture beliefs, he instead cast his ballot against the bill and for a continuation of illegal and immoral torture policies.

The bill McCain voted against would have restricted interrogation techniques to those defined in the Army Field Manual on Interrogation. The senator defended his vote by saying that it would be inappropriate for the CIA to be restricted from using any additional techniques to the 19 delineated in the manual.

While the CIA is prohibited from using “cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment” by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the dispute still remains over what comprises such conduct. This gap, along with the Bush administration’s refusal to declare waterboarding illegal, has left ample opportunity for dubious interrogation conduct, not to mention the further degradation of America’s image in the international community.

The vote also strikes a blow to McCain’s reputation as an uncompromising and morally fixed politician. Though many have said the vote was an attempt to win approval from the far right — a group fond of lambasting the senator’s conservative credentials — it did more to demonstrate that McCain’s personal convictions aren’t as unshakeable as commonly believed.

While he continues to be staunchly anti-waterboarding, McCain’s failure to act upon his convictions — especially one of his trademark principles — begs the question of what other opinions he may diverge from in the future. His pandering to the right deflates his bipartisan chutzpah and weakens a key characteristic attractive to moderate voters.

Beyond the politicking of the primaries and McCain’s personal inaction in ensuring an end to waterboarding, there’s a greater hypocrisy at play. Despite the Bush administration’s continued pontifications of American freedom, liberty and justice, they have simultaneously refused to declare waterboarding illegal and continue the tyrannical policies of Guantanamo Bay. Beyond the simple illegality of such policies, prisoner abuse only further deteriorates America’s standing in global public opinion.

Waterboarding has always been treated as a crime. In addition to prosecuting several Japanese soldiers for waterboarding in WWII, the United States imprisoned a sheriff and three of his deputies in 1983 for using water torture to elicit confession. Not only are the policies in usurpation of international law, they are incriminated by the very precedents found in our nation’s history.

But McCain said it best. In a recent debate with Mitt Romney, McCain told the governor, “If we’re going to get the high ground in this world, and we’re going to be the America that we’ve cherished and loved for more than 200 years, we’re not going to torture people.” He went on to state, “How in the world anybody could think that that kind of thing can be inflicted by Americans on people who are held in our custody is absolutely beyond me.”

You know what’s beyond me? The fact that McCain voted against a bill that would have put an end to the Bush administration’s nefarious evasions of international law and outlawed waterboarding.

[Reach columnist Sarah Gaither at opinion@thedaily.washington.edu.]