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Putting all of McCain’s pro-Georgia bluster aside, one can see that Saakasvili set out to what looks like ethincally targeted violence when he launched his military escapade against South Ossetia. It is only through McCain’s revisionist history that one can forget that Georgia started it:

Georgian troops arrived Khetagurovo on August 8 in a storm of steel and bullets, killing eight people and badly damaging the village of ethnic South Ossetians.

When they left two days later, harried by the Russian forces that crushed Tbilisi’s bid to restore control over its breakaway region, locals say their took four prisoners with them and forfeited any chance of reconciliation.

As I was researching the ‘cross in the dirt’ dust up, I received a mini-education on the treatment of POWs in the hands of the North Vietnamese.PBS’s American Experience documentary series ran “Return with Honor” in 2000, I believe. The vivid history of the American POW is underscored by the drawings of Navy pilot Mike McGrath which recounts the harsh treatment, interrogations and conditions that the Americans were subjected to. See the gallery and McGrath’s commentary, here.

This is, of course, the ironic outcome of taking a look at McCain’s POW experience. I was too young to know what happened in Vietnam beyond reports on CBS News. I suspect that many Americans do not understand that what we would all understand was torture against our men in Vietnam has now been carefully whittled down to euphemisms like, “enhanced interrogation techniques.”Andrew Sullivan points out that by today’s definition brought to us by the Bush Administration, McCain should stop complaining:

The torture that was deployed against McCain emerges in all the various accounts. It involved sleep deprivation, the withholding of medical treatment, stress positions, long-time standing, and beating. Sound familiar?According to the Bush administration’s definition of torture, McCain was therefore not tortured.  

Scott Greenfield asks if John Ashcroft is mean or stupid.  Based on his star turn at Knox College, I’d say mean and cornered.  More at Daily Kos which gives a first hand account of Ashcroft’s mission to justify the transformation of “the role of the Attorney General from a prosecutor of crimes to a preventer of crimes.”

The highlight were the questions posed by the writer of the Kos piece, who asked Ashcroft if he saw any contradiction between the U.S. use of waterboarding today and the war crimes conviction of Japanese soldiers after World War II for essentially the same method of torture.

Read more about the use of water torture by the Japanese, at wooden boat, and expert testimony that water boarding is torture.

Also, if you have the time or inclination, there is this extensive law review article by professor Evan Wallach, “Drop by Drop: Forgetting the History of Water Torture in U.S. Courts,” which was published in the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law.

The World Food Program held a presser on the 22nd where is underscored the dire consequences of a rapid increase in hunger worldwide calling it a silent tsunami:

“This is the new face of hunger — the millions of people who were not in the urgent hunger category six months ago but now are,” Josette Sheeran, executive director of the World Food Program (WFP), said at a London news conference.

. . .

Brown said the “vast” food crisis was threatening to reverse years of progress to create stronger middle classes around the world and lift millions of people out of poverty.

Prices for basic food supplies such as rice, wheat and corn have skyrocketed in recent months, driven by a complex set of factors including sharply rising fuel prices, droughts in key food-producing countries, ballooning demand in emerging nations such as China and India, and the diversion of some crops to produce biofuels . . . the price of a metric ton of rice in parts of Asia had risen from $460 to $1,000 in less than two months.

If you look at the list of causes, none of them are temporary. Oil prices are not expected to go down soon. China and India growth is not expected to tank and climate change is contributing to drought. This story bears very close watching for its ramifications are enormous.

In this new age, you’re either with us or against us and sometimes you’re just there to be useless:

[Gen. Richared] Myers reportedly believed the prisoners were protected against torture by the Geneva conventions’ Common Article 3 [text] even though a memo [text] written by [William] Haynes made it clear the Guantanamo detainees could not rely on the protections. According to former chief of staff to then Secretary of State Colin Powell, Larry Wilkerson, Rumsfeld recommended Myers for the job because he ‘was not a very powerful chairman’ and was easily cut out of important meetings and plans