The administration finally responds to Hamdan

Despite the dire predictions of many around the blogosphere that the Bush administration would simply ignore the Supreme Court's ruling in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, it appears they will at a minimum be implementing new procedures designed to ensure treatment of prisoners is consistent with the Geneva Conventions.

It's interesting that Tony Snow now claims the prisoners at Gitmo have always been treated humanely and consistent with the Geneva conventions, even as the administration insisted that torture should remain an option and that enemy combatants would not covered by the conventions as traditional prisoners of war are. Why insist they aren't covered, if you're treating them as though they are? Why defend your right to torture, if you're not torturing? Does anyone actually believe his bullshit?

Meanwhile one proposal floating through Congress is to simply retroactively withdraw from Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. A group of former high level military lawyers are preparing to testify to fight this proposal because they fear the danger it will put American troops in if they are captured, and if America has been found to be selectively ignoring the parts of the Geneva Conventions it doesn't like. Or as one of the lawyers put it so much better than I ever could:

“We should be embracing Common Article 3 and shouting it from the rooftops,” Admiral Hutson said. “They can’t try to write us out of this, because that means every two-bit dictator could do the same.”

He said it was “unbecoming for America to have people say, ‘We’re going to try to work our way around this because we find it to be inconvenient.’ ”

“If you don’t apply it when it’s inconvenient,” he said, “it’s not a rule of law.”

If we withdraw from any portion of the Geneva conventions, it will be the height of American arrogance. We are not above international law and we are not above morality, and we need to stop acting like it.