Here are a couple of excerpts:
Last Friday, the White House issued an executive order attempting to "interpret" Common Article 3 [of the Geneva Convention] with respect to a controversial CIA interrogation program. The order declares that the CIA program "fully complies..."In other words, as long as the intent of the abuse is to gather intelligence or to prevent future attacks, and the abuse is not "done for the purpose of humiliating or degrading the individual" -- even if that is an inevitable consequence -- the president has given the CIA carte blanche to engage in "willful and outrageous acts of personal abuse."
The Geneva Conventions provide important protections ... Our troops deserve those protections, and we betray their interests when we gratuitously "interpret" key provisions of the conventions in a manner likely to undermine their effectiveness.... violations of Common Article 3 are "war crimes" for which everyone involved -- potentially up to and including the president of the United States -- may be tried in any of the other 193 countries that are parties to the conventions.
The authors note that although the number of casualties in the war on terror is a small fraction of those of WWII and Vietnam, the US did not find it necessary to abandon the principles of the Geneva accord at that time.