Human Rights Watch is Watching

Human Rights Watch has just released a new report on abuses by the US Army: “No Blood, No Foul”: Soldiers’ Accounts of Detainee Abuse in Iraq. [If you can't get it at the previous link, try here.]

Obsidian Wings has a great post about this. OW quotes:

Some of the [Powerpoint] slides were about the laws of war, the Geneva Convention, but it was kind of a starting-off point for them to kind of spout off, you know: why we don’t have to follow these Geneva Convention articles and so forth. Like, you know, inhumane and degrading treatment, well, this specifically relates to POWs, so we don’t have to do this. So basically, we can do inhumane and degrading treatment. [Emphasis added.]

And then they went on to the actual treatment itself, what we were doing, what we’d signed off on and those types of things: cold water and nudity, strobe lights, loud music—that’s not inhumane because they’re able to rebound from it.

So, we can do inhumane and degrade treatment, even though this isn't! So, either way, we're covered!!

Yeah, we're covered, all right. In the same mud and shit and dishonor as those we maltreat.

Obsidian ends on a hopeful note, a reminder that we -- America "we" -- contain multitudes: The horrible things in this report--yes, they are part of what America is, now. But so are the human rights workers who wrote it. So are the soldiers who came forward. So is every citizen who decides this has to end.

Let's all be citizens who decide it has to end.