So much for the "McCain anti-torture bill" actually enforcing America's committment to standards of decency. The Geneva Convention was good WAY back in 1949, but it shouldn't apply to us now! Our military (and our nation?) has progressed so much since then, that we've decided to violate the MINIMAL standards of the Geneva Convention by finally DELETING it's "quaint" prisoner protections from the Army's Field Manual, according to today's
LA Times. Thus institutionalizing the Cheney/Wingnut vision of the American military's ability to "legally" humiliate and torture any person they happen to pick up anywhere in the world.
Military lawyers, known as judge advocates general, or JAGs, have concluded that they will have to wait for a new administration before mounting another push to link Pentagon policy to the standards of Geneva.
It's time to stop pretending this is ALL the work of Dick Cheney and his little band of sociopathic "Neo-Cons," and start calling out the bastard officers in the Pentagon who SHARE their "Murder and Torture as Foriegn Policy" world view. It's time to start naming names in this struggle for the soul of America's armed forces. Because there are some GOOD folks in the Pentagon. They just happen to be overwhelmed by the BAD apples at this moment in history.
"The JAGs came to the conclusion that this was the best they can get," said one participant familiar with the Defense Department debate who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the protracted controversy. "But it was a massive mistake to have withdrawn from Geneva. By backing away, you weaken the proposition that this is the baseline provision that is binding to all nations."
The officers and Pentagon officials who are part of the current Republican/Neo-con junta need to be named, discredited, and run out of positions of authority in our military, just as badly as Bush and Cheney, and their ilk of psychotic "Conservatives" need to be run out of our White House and Congress. Otherwise there will Gitmos, secret prisons, domestic spying, and Hadithas, as far as the eye can see.
I understand the "Support the Troops" meme being promulgated by many "progressives" in an attempt to blunt or innoculate themselves against the "anti-American" BS rhetoric of wingnut America, and focus criticism most where it should rightly be directed. At the civilian political "leadership" of Bush and the Republicans who are responsible for launching this war, and fostering these "policies." But there has to be a limit to that "support."
Any "troop," from the grunt on the ground, up to the Pentagon, is responsible for their own complicity in murder and torture. And the people who are attempting to make murder and torture a permanent part of America's military standards, should be named as the UN-American scum they are.
It's time for Americans, and certainly "progressives," of all stripes to stop giving the military in general a pass for the continual outrages we discover almost every week now. We don't need to criticize ALL American military people to yell at the scumbags currently in charge of it. We need to strengthen the hands of the GOOD American officer corps who have opposed this stuff.
It's obvious that more rational officers see the discarding of Geneva standards, at the very least, a tremendous long term risk, and more likely, a disaster in the making for eventual American prisoners. After all, AMERICAN STANDARDS AND PROTECTIONS WERE THE REASON FOR THE GENEVA CONVENTION!
But the rational officers have been losing the battles with officers aligned with the Bush/Cheney/Dr. Strangelove sociopath world view.
We need to figure out strategies for re-enforcing the good American military officers, while naming and rejecting those bastards responsible for leading our country into this dark immoral morass we find ourselves in now.
If you work in the Pentagon and find yourself shaking your head in silent disagreement, please speak out when you see this stuff happening. If you happen to know the names of officers joining the Bush/Cheney conspiracy to wreck our country's great historical moral standing, including that of our armed forces, name those officers. If not openly, then at least anonymously. As some JAGs have. This toxin thrives in the secrecy and anonymity of the Pentagon. Save this country, and it's military services from further degradation.
Cheers to the JAGs who helped get this story out in today's LA Times.