Treatment of prisoners.

The American Bar Association stood up recently for our soldiers posted around the world now and in the future.

We urged our government to treat our prisoners the way we want other governments to treat our people who fall captive to them, reminding our leaders that what we visit upon our prisoners can be visited upon us.

Al Qaeda and other terrorists pose a real threat to the United States. That threat creates tension between our need to interrogate prisoners for potentially life-saving information, and our legal standards that ban torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.

But we are a nation pledged to the law, because it is the law that shields us--from ourselves, from each other, from would-be tyrants, or from fiery mobs. We demand that other countries adhere to internationally accepted standards, expressed ill the laws we have joined with them to adopt. And when they don't, we cry foul and take them to task.

Now Americans are faced with an unfolding drama of tragic dimension.

Photographs, videotape, and witnesses lend credence to allegations of torture and cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment of prisoners held in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. Official documents appear to have fostered a climate in which pressure to obtain information overcame the restraint of the law.

The ABA stood up for the law when it condemned those who committed abuses and government lawyers and officials who authorized torture. We urged prosecution of those responsible...