The Justice Department lawyers, Robert J. Delahunty and John C. Yoo, who wrote the infamous 2002 torture memos have penned a quaint op-ed piece for the LA Times:
But the Geneva Convention makes little sense when applied to a terrorist group or a pseudo-state. If we must fight these kinds of enemies, we must create a new set of rules.
In this single sentence, they encapsulate what the administration has been up to. The White House does not write domestic or international law on the the level of Geneva, yet it made an attempt to do so in order to permit torture. Yoo and Delahunty are implying "we must create" to be in the future tense, yet the White House, DOJ, and the Pentagon have already written new sets of rules -- complete with loopholes larger than Mr. Bush's ubiquitous verbal pauses.
And this sentence is the first indication that the Nazi analogy is making its way up the ladders in Washington:
One writer on this page even went so far as to compare it to Nazi atrocities. Such absurd claims betray the real weaknesses in the position taken by Gonzales' critics.
It's not a weakness at all -- not when the people being accused of Nazi tactics need to defend themselves against those charges in a major newspaper editorial.
However this plays out historically, the very notion that with the Bush administration, the nation is ensconced in a debate about war crimes, atrocities, and torture at the hands of Americans, is in and of itself allowing these comparisons to be drawn.