Holding the rule of law in contempt

From Senator Dodd's prepared remarks of 24 June, 2008 on the floor of the U.S. Senate:

I don’t think you can hold the rule of law in any greater contempt than sanctioning torture, Mr. President.

Because of decisions made at the highest levels of our government, America is making itself known to the world for torture, with stories like this one:

A prisoner at Guantanamo—to take one example out of hundreds— was deprived of sleep over fifty five days, a month and three weeks. Some nights, he was doused with water or blasted with air conditioning. And after week after week of this delirious, shivering wakefulness, on the verge of death from hypothermia, doctors strapped him to a chair—doctors, healers who took the Hippocratic Oath to “do no harm”—pumped him full of three bags of medical saline, brought him back from death—and sent him back to his interrogators.

To the generation coming of age around the world in this decade, that is America. Not Normandy, not the Marshall Plan, not Nuremberg. But Guantanamo.

Think about it.

We have legal analysts so vaguely defining torture, so willfully blurring the lines during interrogations that we have CIA counterterrorism lawyers saying things like, “if the detainee dies, you’re doing it wrong.”