What's wrong with these people?

GOP Y's torture:

WASHINGTON, Nov. 3 - The House Republican leadership has delayed a vote on a proposed ban against cruel and degrading treatment of prisoners in American custody, and Democrats say the move is an effort to spare Vice President Dick Cheney an embarrassing defeat.

We'll let Milt Bearden explain why that's the wrong thing to do:

When in Pakistan, I oversaw America's covert support to the Afghan resistance that had begun in December 1979. Throughout that war, countless thousands of Afghan insurgents fell into the hands of Soviet forces; a far smaller number of Soviet soldiers were taken prisoner by the Afghan irregulars. I urged the Afghans, the Pakistani officers who supported them, and the politicians on both sides of the "zero line" (the Afghan border with Pakistan) that all combatants taken prisoner deserved the protection of the Geneva Conventions. My most effective argument was founded on reciprocity - that the treatment of prisoners generally reaches symmetry in any war.

Whole thing. It's really simple. If we torture them, they'll torture our guys. Even evil Dick Cheney should be able to understand that.