That's the message that will be sent under a new set of Pentagon guidelines for soldier conduct. The
LA Times has the story, and it's all about ignoring those "quaint" Geneva Conventions.
The headline:
Army Manual to Skip Geneva Detainee Rule
The Pentagon's move to omit a ban on prisoner humiliation from the basic guide to soldier conduct faces strong State Dept. opposition.
Damn that State Department. Always trying to hobble our troops from doing what needs to be done. Why does the State Department hate America?
The first paragraph of the story sums it up:
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.
When did we, as a country, lose our soul? Was it when Bush was elected, or was the rot always there, just waiting for someone to bring it to the surface?
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."
I can't believe that the people making the policy don't know this; it's so blindingly obvious that only George Bush could fail to see it. So, that leaves the only alternative: They know how this will look to the rest of the world and
they just don't care. The mindset seems to be "We're America. We can do whatever we want, because we're America."
For decades, it had been the official policy of the U.S. military to follow the minimum standards for treating all detainees as laid out in the Geneva Convention. But, in 2002, Bush suspended portions of the Geneva Convention for captured Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters. Bush's order superseded military policy at the time, touching off a wide debate over U.S. obligations under the Geneva accord, a debate that intensified after reports of detainee abuses at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison.
Just one of many many ways that George Bush is destroying the soul of this nation.
The move to restore U.S. adherence to Article 3 was opposed by officials from Vice President Dick Cheney's office and by the Pentagon's intelligence arm, government sources said. David S. Addington, Cheney's chief of staff, and Stephen A. Cambone, Defense undersecretary for intelligence, said it would restrict the United States' ability to question detainees.
Putting morality completely aside for the moment (appropriate, given the amoral people who seem to be running our country), it's been proven throughout the ages that torture is a piss-poor way of getting accurate information. Great for getting inaccurate information, though. So, yes, you reptilian power-mongers, adhering to the Geneva Conventions
would limit our ability to question detainees. It would not, however, signficantly impact our ability to get useful intelligence from said detainees. And, as a bonus, the rest of the world might actually consider helping us if we cut down on the incidence rate of naked-detainee pyramids and the like.
Defense officials said the State Department and other agencies had argued that adopting Article 3 would put the U.S. government on more solid "moral footing," and make U.S. policies easier to defend abroad.
Some State Department officials have told the Pentagon that incorporating Geneva into the new directive would show American allies that the American military is following "common standards" rather than making up its own rules. Department officials declined to comment for this article about the directive or their discussions with the Pentagon.
The question, of course, is whether the State Department (last refuge of sane people in the government, it seems) has any actual authority to tell Donald Rumsfeld that playing Spanish Inquisition is a bad idea and should be dropped. Sadly, I doubt it.
Last bit of the article is particularly chilling:
"The overall thinking," said the participant familiar with the defense debate, "is that they need the flexibility to apply cruel techniques if military necessity requires it.
The "flexibility to apply cruel techniques". I want to know who this "participant" is, so we can waterboard him in the name of "flexibility".
-dms