"Standards."

Mark Danner's piece on the Red Cross report, which sheds more light on how the U.S. tortured Guantanamo inmates, is nasty stuff:

Beginning with the chapter headings on its contents page — “suffocation by water,” “prolonged stress standing,” “beatings by use of a collar,” “confinement in a box” — the document makes compelling and chilling reading. The stories recounted in its fewer than 50 pages lead inexorably to this unequivocal conclusion, which, given its source, has the power of a legal determination: “The allegations of ill treatment of the detainees indicate that, in many cases, the ill treatment to which they were subjected while held in the C.I.A. program, either singly or in combination, constituted torture. In addition, many other elements of the ill treatment, either singly or in combination, constituted cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.”

Shall we revisit Putz's sage words from May 2004? Sure.

There are dark moments, however, when I wonder if the world doesn’t hate us because we hold the moral high ground, and if many wouldn’t breathe a secret sigh of relief if we started living down to their standards.

Hehindeed, amirite?