When the Bush White House threatens a veto to PROTECT torture

So far has our leadership sunk. When the Senate (at the instigation of veterans, former POWs, and those members of Congress with a shred of humanity remaining) moves to regularize, limit, and oversee the treatment of "detainees", the Bush White House threatens a veto. This is where we stand: when the Cheney/Bush/Rumsfeld axis takes a public, political stance that torture should be protected.

Let's be clear: Guantanamo Bay is a concentration camp, wherein are held individuals who may have committed no crime other than ethnicity or the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Bush and the architects of Gitmo are guilty of war crimes. They will (like Henry Kissinger, another monster masquerading as a political) eventually be charged with these crimes, probably by the International War Crimes tribunal at Den Haag, but they will never respond to these charges as long as the US uses its force-dominance to ignore international law.

I would not expect the Shrub--a draft dodger who served a few days in the Air Force Reserve, but whose records were mysteriously "lost, or Cheney--who spent the Vietnam Era informing on anti-war activists, or Rumsfeld--who as a non-vet civilian has cost thousands of American and tens of thousand Iraqi lives needlessly--to care about either the practical or the ethical problems with defending torture as official policy.

But John McCain, Colin Powell, and John Shaliskavilii are intimately acquainted with the human, military, and ethical repercussions of torture. The White House stance must make McCain, who spent almost six years in a tiger cage in North Vietnam, want to vomit.

Even the Shrub's father, who fought in a War aimed at defeating ethnic fascism, must be appalled at the acts of his offspring. These are evil, evil men.

[October 25: They're still defending torture. Now they want exemptions for the CIA.]