Proud to be an American?

Here's the lead from an AP story that came out late last night:

WASHINGTON (AP) - The physical and mental abuse of detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay was the direct result of Bush administration detention policies and should not be dismissed as the work of bad guards or interrogators, according to a bipartisan Senate report released Thursday.
The Senate Armed Services Committee report concludes that harsh interrogation techniques used by the CIA and the U.S. military were directly adapted from the training techniques used to prepare special forces personnel to resist interrogation by enemies who torture and abuse prisoners. The techniques included forced nudity, painful stress positions, sleep deprivation and, until 2003, waterboarding, a form of simulated drowning.

The chairman of the committee, Democratic Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, called it "both unconscionable and false" that administration officials tried to blame the abuses on low-level soldiers, or "a few bad apples." Republican Sen. John McCain, perhaps America's best-known former prisoner of war, called the link between the survival training and U.S. interrogations of detainees inexcusable. Said McCain, "These policies are wrong and must never be repeated." Of course, an aide to former Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld brushed off the report. But the story goes on to note that the Bush administration continues to use delaying tactics and sometimes has outright refused to allow members of Congress to see key legal documents and memos regarding the detainee program, including an August 2002 memorandum evaluating whether certain interrogation techniques proposed to be used by the CIA would amount to torture. These are exactly the kinds of things that make it tough for otherwise patriotic Americans to be proud of their country. And before you rush to defend the actions as necessary to break down "Godless terrorists," just think for a minute what our nation's collective reaction would be if we found out that some of our troops were waterboarded or stripped naked and physically abused. It's shameful, no matter who's doing it.