Keeping It Simple - Updated

Well, as I've said before here and here, and as Katherine noted so eloquently here, in the pithy words of Abu Aardvark, "vote for this or against it":

It's not just the possibility of the US commiting these kinds of acts. As Katherine notes so skillfully here, there's still an amen corner for outsourcing torture in Congress and probably in the White House - and it's not in the Kerry camp. So does one vote for the light of freedom or the chemical light broken open and poured on detainees? Please think carefully before you decide.

Hat tip to Ezra Klein at Pandagon.

UPDATE

Lest anyone start accusing me of being a shrill partisan, consider this from the Washington Post:

Mr. Bush and Mr. Rumsfeld still refuse to acknowledge the terrible consequences of the decisions they made, much less correct their mistakes. In a letter published on this page today, Mr. Rumsfeld's spokesman, Lawrence Di Rita, once again claims that no policy or decision made by a senior official had anything to do with the abuses at Abu Ghraib. To bolster his case, he selectively cites official investigations that have, in fact, proven the opposite. For example, Gen. Paul J. Kern, whom Mr. Di Rita quotes, testified to Congress last month that techniques approved by Mr. Rumsfeld in December 2002 -- including nudity, painful stress positions and the use of dogs to incite fear -- "found their way into documentation that we found in Abu Ghraib." The Schlesinger commission, also cited by Mr. Di Rita, determined that Iraq commander Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez approved similar practices, "using reasoning from the President's memorandum" of 2002. It also concluded, "There is both institutional and personal responsibility at higher levels" for the crimes at Abu Ghraib.

Without any change in policy, there is every reason to expect that a second Bush term would produce more scandals like Abu Ghraib. As the history of the past three years demonstrates, such abuses result when the rule of law is set aside. That's why we welcome Mr. Kerry's pledge to resume full U.S. compliance with the Geneva Conventions. Such compliance does not prevent a U.S. president from holding enemy combatants indefinitely or from denying them prisoner-of-war status. It does not prevent American forces from conducting interrogations. But it does ensure that the United States will operate according to the same international standards that it wishes to see applied to its own service members and citizens. "We will abide by a principle long enshrined in our military manuals," says the Kerry statement: "That America does not treat prisoners in ways we would consider immoral and illegal if perpetrated by the enemy on Americans." That strikes us as a policy that is both more in keeping with American standards, and more likely to be successful in practice, than that pursued with such disastrous results by Mr. Bush. [my emphasis]

John Kerry shows a fundamental respect for the rule of law embodied in these sentences: "We will abide by a principle long enshrined in our military manuals: That America does not treat prisoners in ways we would consider immoral and illegal if perpetrated by the enemy on Americans." Why is that so hard for the president to understand?

Hat tip to Eric Umansky

Comments

[Roxanne]

Amen.