Orwellian turns

Well, I guess we learned our lesson. Just days after permitting Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak to students at Columbia University during a trip to speak to the United Nations — Iran's parliament voted to declare the CIA and the U.S. Army as terrorist organizations. Ouch. That hurts. A totalitarian regime with a leader whose verbosity is matched only by his lack of knowledge is criticizing us? Of course, Iran was responding to a U.S. Senate resolution urging the State Department to designate Iran's Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist group and subjecting it to asset seizure and other economic sanctions. But while a lot of Iran's long list of complaints against the U.S. were ludicrous, some were not. The Bush administration's approval of torture for imprisoned terror suspects (the so-called unlawful enemy combatants) violates the Geneva Conventions to which we were a proud supporter is a stain on the United States' long history of respect for the rule of law. But that doesn't make our governmental agencies terrorist organizations any more than it makes Ahmadinejad a reasonable person.