From the LA Times:
WASHINGTON — 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.
[snip]
President Bush’s critics and supporters have debated whether it is possible to prove a direct link between administration declarations that it will not be bound by Geneva and events such as the abuses at Abu Ghraib or the killings of Iraqi civilians last year in Haditha, allegedly by Marines.
But the exclusion of the Geneva provisions may make it more difficult for the administration to portray such incidents as aberrations. And it undercuts contentions that U.S. forces follow the strictest, most broadly accepted standards when fighting wars.
“The rest of the world is completely convinced that we are busy torturing people,” said Oona A. Hathaway, an expert in international law at Yale Law School. “Whether that is true or not, the fact we keep refusing to provide these protections in our formal directives puts a lot of fuel on the fire.”
This is a test:
- Do we care at all whether “the rest of the world is completely convinced that we are busy torturing people”?
- Does this represent who we, as a nation, think we are?
They aren’t trick questions. What did you answer?
I don’t want to discuss the “but that’s what they’re doing, too”. That’s not the question, because they are not Americans, are they?
We are Americans.
There are many opinions in the blogosphere on this, but James Joyner at Outside the Beltway wrote a tremendous post, which says in part (my emphasis):
Even though our enemy by no means adheres to international law, our failure to do so undermines our moral authority. This is not a small thing, whether we’re talking about sustaining support at home, building coalitions with our Western partners, or even the “battle for hearts and minds” in the Arab world. That they don’t follow the Geneva protocols does not prevent our failure to do so from being used against us for propaganda purposes.
They. Them. We are not them, and I, for one, do not want to become them, either.
Blue Crab Boulevard asks:
So, how can these protections be reconciled with the fact that the terrorists do not, and never will, follow the Conventions themselves? I think that question needs to be discussed, but for now there’s a bit too much uproar to have a lucid discussion.
They can’t be reconciled, unless we have decided that to fight them, we have to become them. Have we made this choice? Did we realize that we had?
Just how far down this road do we plan to travel, before we no longer recognize ourselves in the mirror?