Dis-honor

Robert Kuttner reminds us that it isn't only the administration's response to a hurricane that is destroying our reputation and moral standing in the world.

Here is one such story that has gotten far too little attention. Its outcome should prove an important telltale in the still churning political winds:

Senator John McCain, a conservative Republican and a war hero, has been appalled by the administration's policy that prisoners of war in American custody may be deliberately subjected to cruel, degrading, and inhumane treatment as part of interrogations. We are the only nation in the world with such a stated policy.

This doctrine, by the way, was devised in 2002 for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld by then White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, the same man the hard right is attacking as too ''moderate" to be appointed to the Supreme Court.

Senate Armed Services Committee hearings in June made it clear that the administration and its military chain of command still had no coherent directives on just what interrogation techniques were actually permissible -- leaving a few ordinary soldiers like the pathetic Pvt. Lynndie England to take the fall while higher-ups escaped accountability.

So McCain and two other Republicans on the Armed Services Committee, Senators John Warner and Lindsey Graham, drafted an amendment making two simple changes. First, US policy was defined as the interrogation procedures authorized by the US Army Field Manual, which specifically prohibits cruel, degrading, or inhumane treatment. Second, all detainees held by the United States, in whatever invented category, must be registered with the International Committee of the Red Cross.

This is not about who ''they" are, McCain has said repeatedly. It's about who we are. ''We are Americans," he told the Senate, ''and we hold ourselves to humane standards of treatment of people no matter how terrible they may be. To do otherwise undermines our security, but it also undermines our greatness as a nation."

And what did Bush do? He threatened to veto the entire defense appropriations bill if the McCain amendment were included, and dispatched Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney to twist GOP arms.

Since then, dozens of retired generals, admirals, and other ranking officials have signed letters supporting the McCain amendment. Retired Brigadier General James Cullen, former chief judge of the US Army Court of Appeals, told a conference on national security policy in Washington last Monday that the legal experts of the military's own criminal system had been systematically excluded from the setting of interrogation and detention policy after 9/11.