And the day's not over...

Today’s Bush administration news (and the day’s not over)...

You’ll recall it’s supposed to be “OK” that we’re torturing people in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib because those folks are all terrorists, not members of an actual “army.” That’s why they’re allegedly not covered by the Geneva Convention. (OK, it’s a load of hooey, but it’s the closest thing to a justification for torture that the Bush administration has managed to muster.)

But now, let’s look at how we deter the torture and murder of official generals from honest-to-goodness militaries:

The L.A. Times...

An Army interrogator convicted of killing an Iraqi general by stuffing him face-first into a sleeping bag can remain in the military and does not have to go to jail, a court-martial jury ruled Monday night. The sentence was a stunning reprieve for Chief Warrant Officer Lewis E. Welshofer Jr., 43...

...After emotional pleas from Welshofer and his wife for leniency, the jury ruled Monday night that the interrogator must forfeit $6,000 of his salary over the next four months, receive a formal reprimand and spend 60 days restricted to his home, office and church.

Not everything is a slippery slope. But some things are. Torture is one of them.

Meanwhile on the Hurricane Katrina front, we discover that the Bush administration was warned in excruciating detail 48 hours before Hurricane Katrina...

In the 48 hours before Hurricane Katrina hit, the White House received detailed warnings about the storm's likely impact, including eerily prescient predictions of breached levees, massive flooding, and major losses of life and property, documents show.

...and is now stonewalling attempts to discover what happened, so we can fix it before the next hurricane season.

To them, it’s just politics.

It’s politics to me, too: the politics of working together as a society to make sure that fewer people die next hurricane season. Made harder, as usual, by the Bush gang.