WTF Is It Now?!?

Scumbags Who Don't Respect the Geneva Conventions: a former Air Force linguist weighs in on torture and our military

This is a must-read over at Talking Points Memo:

Our trainers were careful to instruct us on the Geneva Conventions and which interrogation techniques were covered and which were illegal. I have a very clear memory of what they said about waterboarding. As I recall, water boarding was classified as torture and was a violation of the Geneva Conventions.

They told us about the technique for the simple reason that the North Vietnamese used it on American Forces. They wanted us to know about that technique in case we were ever captured by "scumbags who didn't respect the Geneva Conventions."

The military trainers at our Survival School had nothing but contempt for techniques like this, and we were taught that they were international criminal offenses.

So thanks, Bush, Cheney, Gonzales, and Rummy, for helping us join the international scumbag community. We have become the people we despised, and we're exposing our troops to the same treatment that we used to hold up as an example of utter moral depravity.

--dg