Definitionally speaking

Referring to new revelations about Dick Cheney's role in promoting the use of torture, Andrew Sullivan writes today:

The only defense by Bush and Cheney against charges of war crimes is that a president definitionally cannot commit war crimes, if he's acting as he sees fit in the defense of the nation.

A president cannot commit war crimes by definition? I think I'm missing something here. So, for example, a president Hussein, or president Milosevic cannot be guilty of war crimes? Oh no, I know what he means. An American president cannot be guilty of war crimes.

Okay, to be fair, it would seem that Andrew is writing from a purely American context. He's talking about war crimes as defined under US law and in relation to the president's constitutional commander-in-chief role.

But come on. Enough with the exceptionalism already.

The new US "Detainee Treatment Act" and its amendments, which by consensus effectively allows the president -- but nobody else, honest -- to authorize "torture light", and which retroactively exempts government personnel (i.e. the CIA) from war crimes charges, should be regarded with contempt.

Let's imagine hypothetically that General E.L. Presidente, of the Great Bananian Republic, orders up a law that authorizes his intelligence service to torture prisoners of war. Does anyone suppose that this law would make the resulting atrocities legal, in the eyes of the world? Do war crimes stop being war crimes, just because the laws of the 'GBR', the offending nation, say they aren't? How about the laws of the USA? Is it different then?

Torture is evil. If the "good guys" use it, it doesn't make the torture good; it makes the "good guys" evil. And if Bush or Cheney or Rumsfeld commanded or authorized torture or other war crimes, they should stand trial in the Hague just like anyone else.

I know, I'm dreaming. Not gonna happen.