As shocking as the photographs were from Abu Ghraib prison, perhaps more galling for me as a former executive branch lawyer was the claim attributed to one of the alleged participants that he had to learn about the 1949 Geneva Convention on his own by searching the Internet. How could the U.S. Army -- my army, which I know to be characterized by honor and integrity -- ask soldiers to detain and interrogate prisoners of war without training them in the fundamental rules that apply?

Now we've learned that this was more than just a breakdown in a particular military command in Iraq. White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, in a memorandum drafted for President Bush, declared -- with only a thin fig leaf of legal analysis -- that the nature of the war against terrorism simply rendered the Geneva Convention "obsolete." And the Wall Street Journal reported this week that, as recently as March of this year, executive branch lawyers advised Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld that U.S. personnel were effectively exempt from international treaties and U.S. laws prohibiting torture. The theory? That law prohibiting torture "must be construed as inapplicable" to interrogations conducted pursuant to the president's wartime commander-in-chief authorities.

The U.S., through its democratic processes, freely agreed to comply with the restraints on torture and mistreatment of prisoners of war embodied in the Geneva Convention (in 1956) and the Convention Against Torture (in 1994), as have many, many other countries.