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Hmmmmm...lets review:

1. The officers griping about Gitmo(whose view you apparently share, since you bolded it and turned it red) claim that those who capture U.S. troops will treat them based on our treatment of prisoners.

2. My point was that the assertion is wrong, since our enemies have committed many atrocities against our troops even when we scrupulously followed the Geneva Convention. My evidence was Japanese, North Korean/Chines and Vietnamese atrocities against our men which had nothing whatsoever to do with how well we were following the Convention.

3. You responded as if my point were "Our enemies didn't follow the Convention, so we don't have to."

4. "Enemies' violations of the convention does not depend on our level of adherence to it, but depend on their level of evil" does not equal "They don't do it, so why should we?"

But wait, it gets better:

Is this part of the rationale, then, for targeting civilians in Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Dresden? If I'm not mistaken, the purposeful targeting of civilians removes all Geneva protections as handily as the failure of third-worlders to wear proper uniforms.

So, you bring up attacks on civilian targets to explain why people from an alliance that delivered 1 kiloton of combat power into Manhattan on a Tuesday morning should be granted full Geneva Convention rights?!? Last time I checked, stockbrokers, waiters and EMTs weren't combatants.

So yes, our behavior should be determined by objective truths, which is why I'm not buying any whining about Gitmo. Not only are we not violating the Geneva Convention or our Constitution, but it should be noted that neither of those documents was meant to hinder the defense of the nation in any way, much less be a suicide pact.

As anyone in the current administration will tell you ... we're waging a whole new method of war. In addition to the domestic initiatives taken against our own in the name of "self-defense", as of August, 2002 the Executive Branch enjoys powers of summary execution and, preparatory to the Battle of Iraq, consulted with theologians, even, interested in proselytizing to the Pope and others the new theory of "Pre-Emptive Just War."

Things are changing.

What hasn't changed are the moral principles on which the protocols of Geneva were founded.

All I'm asking is that Rumsfeld and others resist the urge to claim the full gamut of Geneva protections for our troops on the one hand and play fast and loose with technicalities on the other.

If the rules of war have changed, it's curious in the extreme that our adminstration picks and chooses when it wishes to uphold allegedly static standards of Geneva.

Technically, we could rout any thirdworld country we wished and deny all combatants captured anything like due process thanks to the fact that desperate, backward, primitive thirdworlders rarely get outfitted in uniforms.

But where our own actions are black and white violations of the protocols (such as targeting civilians in Serbia), we ignore the fine print.

I just want consistency, that's all. Anything less leaves our own troops open to being dragged through the dirt. If we don't lead by example, regardless how egregious and savage are the standards of those we're fighting, there is no standard to which we can hold others.

I don't know what your background is but I have a lot of respect for these officers and believe strongly they know of what they speak.

Coming from a military background and having both family and friends on active duty at present, I guess I'm just more inclined to side with the officers rather than the politicians/private businessmen who've never served active duty, put their own lives on the line or suffered the loss of a brother at arms either killed or disappeared as a POW who never came home.

I do not believe in stooping to conquer.