>>Let's assume for one moment that Iraq had zero connection with bin Laden (which is not true, but let's assume for one moment that no connection existed).
>
>from last Friday's Senate Intel data dump....
>

There you go again, trying to confuse the matter with facts ;-)

These guys (the Bush administration) just never stop. This morning President Bush responded to the Senate committee's rebuke of his proposal for the treatment of suspected terrorists. Summary: "Geneva Conventions? We don't need no steenkin' Geneva Conventions". He has been shot down twice now on this issue, first by the Supreme Court and now by a Senate committee controlled by his own party, and he only becomes more obstinate. We need this to win the war on terror, yada yada yada. What a fool.

A few weeks ago The New Yorker had an excellent long piece about the administration's legal approach to interrogation of suspected terrorists, their treatment, rules for their trials, etc. It focused on David Addington, who is Dick Cheney's chief legal advisor and the behind-the-scenes architect of the administration's legal arguments. Downright scary stuff. To me the best thing about it was the cartoon drawing on the page facing the first page of the article. Addington is feeding the Constitution through a shredder, Bush and Cheney standing there with looks of delight on their faces.

The Republican senators who led the resistance to the administration proposal are all decorated veterans, which is more than you can say about chicken hawks like Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld. Their very apt point, which is so blindingly obvious I can't believe anyone is confused about it, is that if we go in this direction it is inevitable that our own captured forces will be treated with equal disregard for human rights. And there wouldn't be much we could say about it, having taken standards of treatment to such a nadir.

"We but teach bloody instructions, which, being taught, return to plague the inventor" -- Shakespeare