Jail birds

I am not, as some might try to tell you, typically a crank. I just believe that fair is fair, and bullshit is bullshit. The fact that this means that I generally end up despising the Bush administration - and Republicans that support it - as just a logical extension of my first point. Fair is fair, bullshit is bullshit. Whether Democrat or Republican.

So, along those lines, I've recently become more convinced that we have various people within the administration who are worthy of being tried for war crimes. I base that on the fact that various torture, I mean, enhanced interrogation techniques, that we use have resulted in war crimes charges and convictions at various times in history. Japanese were executed for waterboarding US prisoners in WWII. Germans were executed for torturing "non uniformed enemy combatants".

The interesting thing about those cases is that they all used the exact same justifications for their actions that the Bush administration uses now. These guys don't wear uniforms, thus Geneva conventions don't apply. That is logically false to anybody with half a brain.

I've been having a conversation with my buddy Anna about the ludicrous nature of this administration, and about how, really, you can't make this stuff up. Nobody would believe you, they'd call you a nutty conspiracy theorist. But yet the verifiable truth of how we treat people is so disgusting and un-American as to be worthy of everyone's disbelief and scorn.

Need your scorn level raised? Try these links:

Upright coffins, used as "segregation boxes" in Gitmo:
http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/08/07/segregation.boxes/index.html#cnnSTCOther1

Extensive analysis of a Nazi war crimes trial. Money quote:

"The very phrase used by the president to describe torture-that-isn't-somehow-torture - 'enhanced interrogation techniques' - is a term originally coined by the Nazis. The techniques are indistinguishable. The methods were clearly understood in 1948 as war-crimes. The punishment for them was death."

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2007/05/verschfte_verne.html

Now, would anyone want to argue that we have less respect for human rights now than we did in 48? Back in 48, blacks served in segregated Army units, and were still being lynched in the South. And yet even in that era, we could see these torture techniques for what they were: war crimes.

Until America prosecutes a few key players from the Bush administration for this, we will have no legitimacy to speak to China or anyone else in the world about human rights. None. We should just shut up and get our own house in order.