Remember the scene in Independence Day where the President sees the captured alien through glass and asks what they want us to do, and the alien answers through Brent Spiner, whom he has taken control of, "Die."

I remember that every time I see a photo of Mohammed Atta, with that cold, dead look in his eyes. The kind of people we're holding at Gitmo or whatever CIA interrogation facilities, have been brainwashed thoroughly. Just to bring them back to being normal human beings would take so deprogramming, but Colin Powell, Lindsay Graham and John McCain and others would probably say that was degrading and humiliating and would make the rest of the world doubt the morality of our war. Considering that the people we're opposing would happily saw the head off any American soldier they captured, unless they were holding him for ransom, which is also war crime, I have a hard time seeing how anybody in his right mind would say that our troops would be endangered in future conflicts. How did the Geneva Conventions save John McCain from torture at the Hanoi Hilton?

I don't want anybody tortured, but that, apparently, is such a vague, subjective term that nobody is really sure what it means. And that goes quadruple for treatment that's personally degrading or huniliating. Most of these former humanoids consider it degradins to be in the custody of Dhimmis or minions of the Great Satan. They no longer have morals in the sense that we understand that term. They have committed themselves to the service of a ghoulish, vengeful god who is in the biblical phrase, a respecter of persons, who loves to see people blow to ribbons by a teenager wanting to be a martyr and spend eternity being serviced by 72 dark-eyed houri. What they deserve is to be roasted on a spit until they beg for death. What they get instead is some scary treatment like "waterboarding," for a few minutes, loud bad rock and being yelled at, or otherwise treated like a Marine in boot camp.

Now, I personally have great doubts about the moral clarity and purpose of those Europeans who wake up hating America and consider us vulgar cowboys and self-righteous upstarts. I also doubt that their standards for using torture are anywhere carefully scrutinized as ours. If someone had destroyed the Eiffel Tower, I doubt the French would be worrying about whether we approved of their response.