Leading By Example

Why we will never be able to lecture other nations on their human rights abuses...

Reuters: Governments say they follow U.S. on jail treatment

Some countries try to refute criticism over their treatment of prisoners by saying they are only following the U.S. example on handling terror suspects, a U.N. human rights expert said on Monday.

Manfred Nowak, the U.N. investigator on torture, told a news conference that "all too frequently" governments respond to criticism about their jails by saying they handled detainees the same way the United States did...

...Nowak, along with other U.N. human rights officials, has criticized U.S. policies against terror suspects, including secret jails, harsh treatment and the lack of due process. He turned down a visit to Guantanamo Bay because he could not interview detainees and prison officials in private...

Thanks, President Bush! Thanks, Vice President Cheney! Thanks, Congress!

Thanks for making us... safer??

Meanwhile, there are reports that the number of those being held in our secret prisons (you know the ones Bush said in September he is closing because the few people he had there were going to Gitmo to face his kangaroo courts) is actually in the tens of thousands. I'm sure they are all terrorists too, of course.

Finally, a conservative blogger hits on a point some have been trying to make to the Bush-defending right for a while: "I can’t wait to hear the bleating when President Hillary Clinton (or whoever) uses all of her expanded powers in 2008. Sure, it was ‘fun’ passing those laws and using those votes to portray all Democrats as terrorist-loving defeatocrats, and it may have yielded some short-term political gains, but we’ll see how much fun those broad powers are in the future."

Bingo.

(And they're not much 'fun' now, for the record)