This issue just really fires me up. Let’s take it piece by piece.

Three leading high-profile Republican senators and former Secretary of State Colin Powell broke from the party loyalists and voted against the Bush administration’s proposal on the rules for interrogating wartime prisoners.

Bush held a news conference to discuss.

Questioning of suspected terrorists “won’t go forward” unless Congress clarifies a U.S. standard for the treatment and interrogation of wartime prisoners, President Bush warned on Friday.

Can you say…  bunch of crap?! This sounds like some spoiled kid on the playground who refuses to play on the swings until the other kids go away. Why can’t the intelligence officers, military personnel and other law enforcement officials play by the rules, just like they have for the last 50 years, and do their job as professionals. He makes it sound like everything will just come to a screeching halt if the new rules are passed. One of the things that differentiated American forces from other countries during World War II is that captured prisoners knew they would be treated fairly and humanely, even in most cases, better then their own governments. Often times the only way for enemy soldiers to live was to surrender to US forces, rather then face returning to their commands defeated.

“You cannot ask a young intelligence officer to violate the law,” Bush said. “If Congress passes a law that does not clarify the rules … the program is not going forward.”

So basically he’s saying, we want conduct interrogations in a certain way, which is currently against the law so please change the law so we can continue to do it without doing anything wrong. Just ingnore the fact that what they are doing is morally wrong.

“My job and the job of the people here in Washington, D.C., is to protect this country,” Bush said.

Um… yeah, but your job is also to uphold and defend the constitution of the United States. When did we, as a society, decide crimes against humanity was ok as long as we are protecting ourselves?

“I believe Americans want us to protect the country, to have clear standards for our law enforcement, intelligence officers, and give them the tools necessary to protect us within the law.”

There ARE clear standards. The President just doesn’t like the standards. He wants unobstructed power to interrogate prisoners any way our government sees fit. What is this “V for Vendetta”???

In spite of how terrible the terrorists are and how much vengence we want, we can’t allow ourselves to collectively sink to their levels, to levels of indecency where moral values and personal rights and liberties, even for prisoners, are cast aside in the blind pursuit of justice.

Article 3 prohibits nations engaged in combat not of “an international character” from, among other things, “violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture” and “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment.”

Link to CNN.com - Bush: Without my plan, detainee questioning won’t continue - Sep 15, 2006