Petraeus Drops A Bomb

Naturally, Army Generals tend to do that kind of thing, but David Petraeus did it on FOX News.

The head of the US Central Command, General David Petraeus, said Friday that the US had violated the Geneva Conventions in a stunning admission from President Bush’s onetime top general in Iraq that the US may have violated international law.

“When we have taken steps that have violated the Geneva Conventions we rightly have been criticized, so as we move forward I think it’s important to again live our values, to live the agreements that we have made in the international justice arena and to practice those,” Gen. Petraeus said on Fox News Friday afternoon.

Petraeus made the comment in the context of being asked about the Bush administration’s so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques.” The now-Central Command chief said he believed that banning the more extreme techniques had taken away “a tool” employed by “our enemies” as a moral argument against the United States.

Petraeus didn’t say which parts of the Geneva Conventions he thought he and other administration officials had violated.

Now, in one sense it could be a slip. in another sense, our top General in Iraq just admitted that the American military has committed international war crimes.

Not "if". Not "others say we have". It's "We have taken steps that have violated the Geneva Conventions". That's devastating. We are bound by international law to investigate and prosecute based on this.

Yet...nobody seems to have caught this other than the lefty blogs, and Petraeus goes on to say that he not only believes that we violated the Geneva Conventions on torture, but that Gitmo should be closed, and that terrorists should be tried in courts of law...basically everything I've been saying for the last several months.

And yet both the President and the Wingers are suddenly ignoring the guy. Talk about a Friday Night News Dump.

My opinion of David Petraeus up until now has not been very high. All that has changed dramatically in the space of a five minute interview with FOX.