I think it's easy for civilians (like me) to look at war and let everything merge into a very dark gray. With so much killing going on, what's so abominable about a little torture?

But for most of the military for most of our history, killing and being killed were just part of the job. As long as the other side is shooting at you, killing them any way you can is totally okay.

This obviously isn't a code that applies off the battlefield, but it defined war in a way that preserved a remnant of humanity for combatants.

But when the shooting stops, when somebody surrenders, you're in an entirely different situation, and there is nothing, absolutely nothing lower than abusing prisoners, without even thinking about torture.

The psychology of professional soldiers has always been that war is something like a sport, and as crazy as that sounds to everybody else, it still imposed some definite rules about treatment of civilians and prisoners.

For a soldier in a war-zone, there's no dishonor in killing other soldiers. But torture turns war into a total senselessness, and it leaves our soldiers with nothing to hope for except survival. No sort of honor is possible when the last vestige of human consideration has been lost: When our enemy is nothing but a thing that can be brutalized without limit, then we have also ceased to be human.

Our refusal to mistreat prisoners saved thousands and tens of thousands of lives, well illustrated in the story of a German soldier whose father gave him three bits of advice before he went to war: "Never volunteer, always do your duty, and surrender to the first American soldier you see."

God damn George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and allo who travel with them.