Progress

I'm sure you've heard about the whole torture debate that is going on. Bush tried to pull off an election-year gambit by putting up a bill that he knew Democrats would oppose so he could claim they were week on terra. Only it seems that the primary opposition is coming from within his own party, allowing democrats the rare pleasure of sitting back and watching the fight.

Lost in the debate, and buried in this story, is the specifics of what Bush is proposing. I find the following pretty astounding:

McCain, a former prisoner of war, did not elaborate on how an agreement can be achieved on whether to allow highly controversial methods by the CIA, such as electric shock, forced nakedness and waterboarding, in which a subject is made to think he is drowning. The Bush administration says those techniques have foiled terror plots. Opponents say they verge on torture.

Bush says that he's just trying to clarify Article 3 of the Geneva Convention, the portion of international law that governs the treatment of prisoners of war. He says it's needlessly vague. It says:

To this end the following acts are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever with respect to the above-mentioned persons:

(a) Violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture;

(b) Taking of hostages;

(c) Outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment;

(d) The passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples

Now maybe Dear Leader has a point, maybe this is a little vague. It seems to me, though, that it's sufficiently clear for one to infer that making someone think they're drowning or shooting electric current through them would be pretty much a no-no. And if Bush doesn't think that stripping someone naked is humiliating and degrading, perhaps he would be open to giving his next televised press conference in the altogether.

Not to be overly dramatic, but I find it shocking (no pun intended) that this even has to be discussed - that somebody has to take the time to explain to our president that you can't strip people naked, hold them under water and pump them full of voltage. And leaving aside the irony of this in light of soaring rhetoric about how we liberated the people of Iraq from this kind of treatment, you'd think that people would understand that the best reason not to do this is so that the next time one of our GIs gets captured, he isn't, you know, stripped naked, held under water and pumped full of voltage.