Amend the Cons ution and repeal treaties. You can't just set them aside willy-nilly, if you care about our form of government.
Then change the Cons ution legally to embrace torture as an acceptable mode of interrogation. Then get out of treaties that prohibit that sort of conduct. But don't just decide that it's expedient in a particular moment to ignore it and treaties.
Amend the Cons ution and repeal treaties. You can't just set them aside willy-nilly, if you care about our form of government.
Bush never tortured durning his presidency.
Noone has been tortured. I am saying we should!
Of course. This is entirely academic because nobody has actually been tortured. Nevertheless, we should torture even if the Cons ution and treaties prohibit it; we can just ignore those things whenever we feel like it, eh?
http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/Investigat...ory?id=1322866According to a classified report prepared by the CIA Inspector General John Helgerson and issued in 2004, the techniques "appeared to cons ute cruel, and degrading treatment under the (Geneva) convention," the New York Times reported on Nov. 9, 2005.
There were criminal referrals to DOJ. Cheney quashed them.
That's not torture.
From Ex Parte Milligan:
When peace prevails, and the authority of the government is undisputed, {124} there is no difficulty of preserving the safeguards of liberty, for the ordinary modes of trial are never neglected, and no one wishes it otherwise; but if society is disturbed by civil commotion — if the passions of men are aroused and the restraints of law weakened, if not disregarded — these safeguards need, and should receive, the watchful care of those intrusted with the guardianship of the Cons ution and laws. In no other way can we transmit to posterity unimpaired the blessings of liberty, consecrated by the sacrifices of the Revolution.
But we shall be answered that the judgment under consideration was pronounced in time of war, and it is, therefore, at least, morally excusable. There may, or there may not, be something in that. I admit that the merits or demerits of any particular act, whether it involve a violation of the Cons ution or not, depend upon the motives that prompted it, the time, the occasion, and all the attending cir stances. When the people of this country come to decide upon the acts of their rulers, they will take all these things into consideration. But that presents the political aspect of the case, with which we have nothing to do here. I would only say, in order to prevent misapprehension, that I think it is precisely in a time of war and civil commotion that we should double the guards upon the Cons ution. In peaceable and quiet times, our legal rights are in little danger of being overborne; but when the wave of power [71 U.S. 2, 76] lashes itself into violence and rage, and goes surging up against the barriers which were made to confine it, then we need the whole strength of an unbroken Cons ution to save us from destruction.
Arbitrary application of law is exactly what the Cons ution of this country was created to address and eliminate (as much as possible, anyway).
It is the proverbial "take the good with the bad".
The CIA's IG thought so. So does the Red Cross. The FBI pulled its agents from the program because they thought so too. Recent declassifications strongly suggest it, and the trend of anecdotal evidence isn't pretty.
What do you base your opinion on?
The inconvenience of dealing with the possibility that it might be torture.
To borrow a phrase from CD, he uses his ignorance like a shield.
Since none of them thar Muslims will tell us what we know they know, let's round 'em all up, confine them, and put 'em in ovens and gas chambers. They're all threats, after all. And they hate us because we're us. That kind of hate jest won't go away. And they might steal our precious bodily fluids too.
jack, don't you just feel their beady little eyes on you right now?
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