It’s amazing to watch one potential Republican presidential candidate after another melting down in public. Yesterday it was Rick Santorum’s turn: Santorum: John McCain wrong on torture.

Rick Santorum said Tuesday that Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who was tortured as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, “doesn’t understand how enhanced interrogation works.”

Speaking on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show, Santorum, the presidential hopeful and former Pennsylvania senator, says McCain is misguided in his stance against the enhanced interrogation techniques sanctioned during the Bush administration but discontinued by Obama’s White House, which has labeled them torture.

“Everything I’ve read shows that we would not have gotten this information as to who this man was if it had not been gotten information from people who were subject to enhanced interrogation,” Santorum said, referring to the courier that led Americans to Osama bin Laden. “And so this idea that we didn’t ask that question while Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was being waterboarded, he doesn’t understand how enhanced interrogation works. I mean, you break somebody, and after they’re broken, they become cooperative.”

Today Santorum tried to backpedal, but didn’t retract his enthusiastic endorsement of torture: Santorum says he meant ‘nothing ill’ toward McCain.

Former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) said he meant “nothing ill” toward Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) after suggesting that the Arizona Republican “doesn’t understand” enhanced interrogation.

Santorum wouldn’t back off his assertion that McCain was wrong for opposing the use of enhanced interrogation techniques such as waterboarding against suspected terrorists.

But Santorum, a likely Republican presidential candidate, said he didn’t mean to disparage McCain, who endured torture as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.