Sounds like Bush is doing a flip-flop on torture -- at first he was for it, but now he's against it.

I notice how accurate you are, as usual, in your generalization of issues.I don't think I have seen anywhere an acknowldedgement of "secret foreign torture dungeons". Nobody can accuse you of making assumptions! Of course, when these sweet fellows start to speak, they will recount the horrors of their detention..but any scars that are on them will be far older than their imprisonment. And they will not be missing any body parts. And their body weight will be within normal.

Has anyone noticed how the people who are most horrified at embarrassing, scaring, and exhausting accused terrorists are equally outraged and loudly denouncing the infliction of scars, missing limbs, missing heads, and bombing massacres against women and children by those who are doing so in the name of Islam? NO? Neither have I. I haven't noticed any massive demonstrations against these atrocities done by people doing their best to institute a "religious", if I dare abuse that word in this context, dictatorship. I must have missed these in my daily reading of news from around the world.

I have noticed that the countries accused of helping us hide the kind folks recently brought into Gitmo have very recent memories of what it is like to live under brutal dictatorships who use atrocities to control their people, and are struggling themselves to come into full democracy. I wonder what memories they have that make them so helpful in preventing any more dictatorships?

I draw the line before anything resembling actual torture, like that listed above which actually touches people and leaves them physically scarred outside and inside, headless, limbless, tongueless etc.

I also draw the line at standing by helplessly while the monstrous adherents of a brutal ideology continue their 30 year history of killing anyone who disagrees with their brand of "religion" ( sorry, I don't mean to abuse the word religion, but I have no better). Their ideology is clear. They are driven to destroy anything resembling freedom, because freedom means that people are free to NOT be the kind of "Muslim", (again I fear abuse of a word in this context), they think everyone should be. Hasn't anyone else noticed how many true MUSLIMS these, umm, people, are killing throughout the world? The dead Muslims aren't the right kind of Muslims I guess.

So, if embarrassing and scaring these ideological nut-cases gets information that prevents the deaths of more people, of all kinds, all religions, all sexual orientations, all genders, all faiths, all political beliefs, all abilities, then....I am for it. I draw the line against the use of terror to advance the ideology of ANY kind of fascism.

The Geneva Conventions do not list what is acceptable and what is not, do not define what is humane, what is not, but I think memory demands some reflection. Memories of hundreds of thousands of people in mass graves and human ashes in the air, human skin lampshades and medical "experiments" with unwilling, to say the least, victims, of humans so thin we wonder how they lived, survivors living amongst us today with tattoos and memories so horrible they often cannot even speak of them. Folks wearing stars and triangles and crosses, disabled people, dissidents, all being herded into cattle cars and taken away to unimaginable horrors. That's odd, I just realized these are the same people the current fascist ideology wants to eliminate.

Anyway, when the Geneva Conventions were written, they were not thinking of humiliation and fear, I think they had a little more in mind when the words "inhumane" were written.

Using humiliation and fear of some people to prevent the true torture and death of others,.......ok, that is where I draw my line.

Those methods though "despicable" as they may be to you have probably saved more lives than you think. And let's not forget we are at war and it is tea party compared to what the enemy does to our boys when they are captured. Now is not the time to be soft.