More torture

There's a good piece on the torture scandal in Capitol Hill Blue today. Writer Dale McFeatters makes a comparison I've not seen elsewhere:

The administration's justification for its self-granted exemption from the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners was that al Qaeda was a stateless terrorist organization and that the Taliban were agents of a "failed state." They were, in the administration's phrase, "illegal combatants."

This reasoning is depressingly close to North Vietnam's own justification for its own flouting of the Geneva Conventions and the inhumane treatment of U.S. POWs: that the Vietnam War was illegal and thus the Americans fighting it were criminals.