Bush - GOP "Rebels" Torture Accord a really bad joke...

The Torture Bill continues to dominate the news. NYT has a scathing editorial that pretty much states, although more eloquently, my take on it in yesterday's Detroit News post. The more details that emerge, the more it appears to be one more shameless GOP scam perpetrated for political gain at the ballot box and having virtually nothing to do with improving our standing in the court of world opinion by mandating humane treatment of prisoners of war. It's all an elaborate ploy to frame the bill as something positive and then force the Democratic Party to vote against it, as the piece of excrement it is, and then frame the Dems as being soft on terror. It's worked for the GOP before. We can only hope the less politically informed in the rank and file of the electorate won't be fooled again.

As the Times notes, "Here is a way to measure how seriously President Bush was willing to compromise on the military tribunals bill: Less than an hour after an agreement was announced yesterday with three leading Republican senators, the White House was already laying a path to wiggle out of its one real concession."

Shorter version is nothing has really changed. Bush still gets to do whatever he damn well pleases under his own intepretation of the Geneva Conventions and all this bill will do is create at least an illusion of legality around his illegal conduct, and perhaps provide some legal cover for the administration to avoid being charged, as they should be, with war crimes. This will certainly do nothing to lessen the increased danger our own troops are now in should those who might be holding them prisoner decide to take Bush's lead and form their own interpretations of conduct under the Conventions, that have been unchallenged and in fact commonly honored as civilized rules of combat for many, many decades. That simply can't be good.