New vague

A glimpse into the president's mind.

The president took care to say that he wishes to have those obligations “clarified” rather than “reinterpreted.” In particular, he said, the Conventions’ ban on “outrages on human dignity” are so vague that they demand clarification.

"Outrages on human dignity" are vague? Seems pretty clear to me. If it feels wrong, it likely is. If CIA interrogators don't want to be tried as war criminals, they shouldn't commit war crimes. Furthermore, according to Geneva Convention historians, article 3 was left intentionally vague.

The Post spoke to Army Lt. Col. Geoffrey S. Corn, who until recently was chief of the war law branch of the Army's Office of the Judge Advocate General.

Corn told the Post ... "that Common Article 3 was, according to its written history, 'left deliberately vague because efforts to define it would invariably lead to wrongdoers identifying 'exceptions,' and because the meaning was plain -- treat people like humans and not animals or objects.'"

It's amazing we're even having this conversation, but then again, the leader of the free world is a petulant bully.

Although he declared his eagerness to work with Congress, Mr. Bush raised his voice several times and poked the air with his index fingers for emphasis.

“I was surprised at how tough he was,” David Gergen, who has been an adviser to several presidents, said in an interview on CNN.

UPDATE: Via The Poorman, Dahlia Lithwick in Slate:

In a superb article last fall in the Columbia Law Review, professor Jeremy Waldron argued that there is "something wrong with trying to pin down the prohibition on torture with a precise legal definition." That it seems to "work in the service of a mentality that says, 'Give us a definition so we have something to work around, something to game, a determinate envelope to push.' " And indeed it would be worrisome if the president were trying to create a sharp, bright line-rule for when interrogation crosses into torture, so that his agents could dance right up to it and stop, or find tricky ways to tunnel under it. But I suspect that the Bush administration doesn't seek to clarify the definition of torture so much as to confound it. The whole objective of defining, refining, and then redefining the rules has become an end in itself. It keeps our attention trained where the president wants it: on the assertion that old bans on torture don't work and that this conflict is unlike any conflict contemplated under existing international law. All this murk and confusion has begun to be the object of the game and not a casualty of it.