Punishable by Death

Andrew Sullivan makes a rather compelling case for why Bush, Cheney, Yoo and the lot of them had better be interviewing some damned talented lawyers. In a nutshell:

[T]he interrogation methods approved and defended by this president are not new. Many have been used in the past. 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.

Here's the scariest/most depressing part of Sullivan's post:

Also: the use of hypothermia, authorized by Bush and Rumsfeld, was initially forbidden [by the Nazis]. 'Waterboarding" was forbidden too, unlike that authorized by Bush. As time went on, historians have found that all the bureaucratic restrictions were eventually broken or abridged. Once you start torturing, it has a life of its own.

We have a president who loses in comparison with early Nazis in terms of his support of torture.

Most damning in all this is the fact that war-crimes trials in 1948 in Norway essentially nullify the Bush administration's assertion that they're not obligated to comply with the Geneva Convention because the "enemy combatants" they're torturing are not in uniform, stripping away the only conceiveable defense they have for their actions. Nor did the notion that the Nazi criminals tried in Norway were humane with some of their captives earn them any clemency:

The victims, by the way, were not in uniform. And the Nazis tried to argue, just as John Yoo did, that this made torturing them legit. The victims were paramilitary Norwegians, operating as an insurgency, against an occupying force. And the torturers had also interrogated some prisoners humanely. But the argument, deployed by Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and the Nazis before them, didn't wash with the court. Money quote:

As extenuating circumstances, Bruns had pleaded various incidents in which he had helped Norwegians, Schubert had pleaded difficulties at home, and Clemens had pointed to several hundred interrogations during which he had treated prisoners humanely.

The Court did not regard any of the above-mentioned circumstances as a sufficient reason for mitigating the punishment and found it necessary to act with the utmost severity. Each of the defendants was responsible for a series of incidents of torture, every one of which could, according to Art. 3 (a), (c) and (d) of the Provisional Decree of 4th May, 1945, be punished by the death sentence.

Of course it's pointless to draw this parallel without outlining what one feels is the appropriate response by the rest of the world. Should Bush et al. be tried as war criminals? The mere notion strikes some folks as treason. The fact of the matter is that, unless we lose this "war," there's little chance anyone could get a court to hear the case. And it's worth remembering that Bush has not done anything even remotely as evil as what the Nazis eventually wrought.

Sullivan sort of cops out in calling for a response, though. I understand why. I'm at a loss for what I think the appropriate response (aside from impeachment [and even there, mostly because of the domestic spying issue, where he clearly intended to break the law]) should be. To watch a US president tried for war crimes doesn't strike me as a good thing for this nation. There's no easy path back from that point.

We'll have to wait for the stories of those tortured via Bush's authorization to emerge to see how we really feel about all this, I suspect. Too many of them, of course, will not be telling any tales.

How on earth did we get to this point?