It's About Us, Not Them

We signed the Geneva Conventions. That makes the Geneva Conventions the law of this land. We signed the international treaty against torture. That makes it the law of this land. We are a nation of laws, right?

I keep hearing the argument that "if our boys had been captured by Al Qaeda they could have expected worse." That is completely beside the point. We decided that we were not going to torture. We made it the law and those that violated that law are criminals.

There is also the (mindbogglingly doubtful) idea that we somehow gained useful information by waterboarding a detainee 183 times in a month. That's not interrogation. It's not questioning. It's torture for the sake of torture.

The techniques recently revealed in the "torture memos" so far are the same as those used by the Khmer Rouge to force confessions out of prisoners. We're supposed to be getting "actionable intelligence" out of these people, not forced confessions of guilt. What kind of evil, drooling idiots order this kind of treatment?