This is completely unrelated to anything I would normally post on, but I'm so appalled that I had to write it down somewhere. According to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, it's ok to torture innocent people because they are not protected by that little "cruel and unusual punishment" thing. It's not punishment, it's interrogation, therefore it's fine. Apparently it's ok to use cruel and unusual techniques on people who've not been proven guilty. So I'm twisting his words a little, but seriously, it's terrifying. And I promise you, I'm not twisting his words nearly as much as he's twisting his own: he's using debating techniques worthy of a seven year old. I quote: "Is it really so easy to determine that smacking someone in the face to determine where he has hidden the bomb that is about to blow up Los Angeles is prohibited in the Constitution?" Yeah, I know he's talking about preventing theoretical terrorist attacks but I didn't realize you could torture someone to see if they were planning to do something bad. That would certainly make law enforcement a whole lot easier. How the hell did this guy get on the Supreme Court? I can't even blame Bush for this one. Read the whole thing here.
*Photo from Wikipedia
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Torture Innocent Only
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4 comments:
This is exactly why I left law school. Something about manipulating language is interesting in the creative writing world, but when it involves torturing innocent people, oh i don't know, it just seems wrong somehow...
But see, it's not wrong, it's necessary. In fact, it's practically our constitutional right... nay... our constitutional DUTY.
The sad thing is, it works. They think you know where a nuclear device is? Anywhere in the world, ANYWHERE in the world, any security service, you WILL get tortured and you WILL talk.
The concern is to protect folks in the security services afterwards.
It works if the guy knows where the nuclear device is. But he's innocent until proven guilty right? So what if he's innocent? Then torturing him WON'T work, because he won't know anything to give away. The ends justifies the means argument in this case translates to: it's ok to torture people who we think might be guilty because we think they might have information about something that might happen. Talk about a slippery slope.
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