Bush Detainee Plan Adds to World Doubts Of U.S., Powell Says - washingtonpost.com

Good for Colin Powell. But, a little too tentative and much too late. "People are now starting to question whether we're following our own high standards?" I'd say that the questioning started as soon as we opened up our legal free zone in Guantanamo Bay and ended with the reports coming out of Abu Ghraib.

Much, much damage has been done already. We are now far down the road to public acceptance of torture, indefinite deteniton, and other practices that I thought I'd never see my country engage in, much less unabashedly endorse as a matter of policy. But the most damning step is the one we're about to take: if the President has his way with the torture bill and the detainee tribunal bill, we'll no longer be able to say that this was a President who slipped past legal restraints and abused his office.

One last comment: where the hell are the Democrats on this? I've seen some commentators remark on how brilliant the Democratic "strategy" is: let Senators McCain, Warner, and Graham take a stand against the Administration, weakening the GOP while Democrats avoid criticism of their own. On a moral level, that sort of stance is reprehensible: this is torture and kangaroo courts we're debating here, not corn subsidies. On a political level, the strategy has significant costs: it lets the public think the GOP is far less extreme than it is on these issues, and it makes the Democrats look directionless and timid on pressing issues of national security.

There is only one role for the Democratic Party vis a vis the Torture President: call him out on it, loudly, every day until the election. If Democrats can't take a stand against torture and kangaroo courts, they truly have no spine.