I don’t think there’s anything more important you have to do today than to go read all of what Billmon wrote:

I caught Commander Codpiece on the tube today, explaining to the assembled White House press zombies why the Geneva Convention’s Common Article 3 is “vague” and “open to interpretation.” By which he meant: “It lets us waterboard anybody we like.”

The fact that we have over 50 years of law and precedent based on Article 3, that the U.S. military has issued (and now re-issued) an entire field manual interpreting it, that the U.S. Code contains a specific statute to enforce it — these apparently haven’t resolved those pesky ambiguities that have created so many PR problems for the Children of Light in their eternal war against the Children of Darkness.

But, as Marty Lederman asks over at Balkinization, if Article 3 is so “vague,” and our organs of state security never use torture (as President Cheney and his underlings tell us repeatedly) then why are the administration’s mouthpieces fighting so hard to get Congress to bar the courts from reviewing methods such as hypothermia, near drowning, standing in place with hands shackled over head for 40 hours or more, etc.? And why are the Rovian clone clowns on Capitol Hill trying to amend the War Crimes Act? And why are CIA operatives suddenly taking out “torture insurance” (including the accidental death or dismemberment riders)?

The answers are pretty obvious: They’re all exposed. Their great big flabby asses are hanging out in the legal breeze, and they know it. They actually scared it could come to this.

We are, in a sense, at the moment of truth. The sadistic and/or bizarre acts committed in Guatanamo, Abu Ghraib and the CIA’s secret prisons can be written off as the crimes of a few bad apples with names like Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld — or, more charitably, as the consequences of a string of bad and brutal decisions made under emergency conditions by men who were terrified by all the things they didn’t know about Al Qaeda. Either way, they were not acts of national policy, endorsed and approved by Congress after open, public debate. But, thanks to the Hamdan decision, the question is now formally on the table:

Does Congress really want to make the United States the first nation on earth to specifically provide domestic legal sanction for what would properly and universally be seen as a transparent breach of the minimum, baseline standards for civilized treatment of prisoners established by Common Article 3 — thereby dealing a grevious blow to the prospect of international adherence to the Geneva Conventions in the future?

The answer, at the moment, appears to be yes, even as Senators Warner, McCain and Graham (i.e. the Senate GOP “conscience caucus”) try to paint a figleaf over the nasty truth:

The so-called “final” version of the Warner-Graham bill, now dubbed the Warner-McCain-Graham bill on military commissions . . . is still a very bad bill, eliminating judicial review and habeas corpus, and limiting criminal enforcement of Geneva Common Article 3 under the War Crimes Act (apparently Geneva [common article] 3 is still law, but only “grave violations” of Geneva are criminally enforceable).

And this is the bill the Cheneyites have threatened to veto — putting torture on the same exalted plain as banning stem cell research. [...]

What this amounts to (and what Powell was really complaining about) is the final decommissioning of the myth of American exceptionalism — once one of the most powerful weapons in the U.S. arsenal. Without it, we’re just another paranoid empire obsessed with our own security and willing to tell any lie or repudiate any self-proclaimed principle if we think it will make us even slightly safer.