What were they Thinking!!!!

This is what I woke up to this morning as I opened the LA Times to the front page:

The Pentagon has decided to omit from new detainee policies a key tenet of the Geneva Convention that explicitly bans "humiliating and degrading treatment," according to knowledgeable military officials, a step that would mark a further, potentially permanent, shift away from strict adherence to international human rights standards.


My first response was that if this was not grounds for impeachment for cause, it was grounds for impeachment for sheer stupidity. Currently we are investigating - Oh! So Many! - allegations of torture and murder that our troops are accused of committing. From Abu Grahaib to Haditha to Gitmo, we have killed and tortured people who we didn't have enough translators to interpret, all to keep Amerika "safe." Alberto Gonzalez, the chief architect of the administration's it's fun to torture brown skinned people in violation of international law because we have god on our side - actually got promoted for writing the memo that says torture is okay and legal if we do it, but not if they do it. In an appallingly sick show of alleged honor, Gonzalez threatened to resign last week because representatives thought he shouldn't have searched the office of a congressperson who had 90,000 in his freezer at home. However his real shame is letting all of our servicemen and women become potential torturers. What does it do to a young person to be directed to put electrodes on another human?

The administration's response to the Haditha massacre was to put together a "Core Values" slide show for the troops in Iraq. It was to emphasize the legal, moral and ethical standards for war. What happens when the policy manual doesn't have any ethical or legal standards?

America is a long-time signatory to the Geneva Convention. The thinking goes that there are rules of war and if we abide by them we can expect others to abide by them. We can't be shocked, shocked, shocked if our service men and women come into harm's way, get tortured or beheaded - because we have no moral standing to complain.

We win the war by being better, not by being just as bad.