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No, back to the act being only an element of the crime being alleged.
Back to the accidental waterboarding defense.
What crime are you alleging?
Back to the accidental torture defense!
No, back to the act being only an element of the crime being alleged.
Back to the accidental waterboarding defense.
What crime are you alleging?
You still don't know?
I'll just let your words speak for me from now on.
It could be more than one. Please specify.
So, you still don't know what statute under which you'd charge these people?
Asked and answered.
I know.
I told you were it is.
in A, man.
Well, good luck with that.
The argument from expedience that saving lives justifies torture ought to be proved in courtrooms, not assumed as a matter of course. If we assume it, torture becomes SOP anytime we get scared.
Americans seem to be fine with using it on terrorists and suspected terrorists, but once this door is opened there is no telling what might be deemed sufficiently heinous (or dangerous to society) to warrant it in the future. Once expedience is allowed to trump principle, in theory there is no rational limit to the expansion of the practice, because in some sense all criminals are at war with society.
One difference between civilized and barbaric systems of law is the protection afforded to offenders. Civilization protects the guilty from the irregular composition of the mob, whereas barbaric societies resort to outlawry, in the antique sense: caput gereret lupinum. Let him bear the wolf's head. Outlawry places the offender beyond the protection of the law. He is considered a wild animal and may be pursued and killed with impunity by anyone at all.
The normalization of torture represents a reversion to outlawry and self-help, hence, to the barbaric origins of Anglo-Saxon justice.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/...1d6_story.htmlAfter a contentious closed-door vote, the Senate intelligence committee approved a long-awaited report Thursday concluding that harsh interrogation measures used by the CIA did not produce significant intelligence breakthroughs, officials said.
The 6,000-page do ent, which was not released to the public, was adopted by Democrats over the objections of most of the committee’s Republicans. The outcome reflects the level of partisan friction that continues to surround the CIA’s use of waterboarding and other severe interrogation techniques four years after they were banned.
The report is the most detailed independent examination to date of the agency’s efforts to “break” dozens of detainees through physical and psychological duress, a period of CIA history that has become a source of renewed controversy because of torture scenes in a forthcoming Hollywood film, “Zero Dark Thirty.”
Officials familiar with the report said it makes a detailed case that subjecting prisoners to *“enhanced” interrogation techniques did not help the CIA find Osama bin Laden and often were counterproductive in the broader campaign against al-Qaeda.
The committee chairman, Sen. Dianne Feinstein *(D-Calif.), declined to discuss specific findings but released a written statement describing decisions to allow the CIA to build a network of secret prisons and employ harsh interrogation measures as “terrible mistakes.”
“I also believe this report will settle the debate once and for all over whether our nation should ever employ coercive interrogation techniques,” Feinstein said.
That conclusion has been disputed by high-ranking officials from the George W. Bush administration, including former vice president Richard B. Cheney and former CIA director Michael V. Hayden. Both of them argued that the use of waterboarding, sleep deprivation and other measures provided critical clues that helped track down bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader who was killed in a U.S. raid in Pakistan in May 2011.
Largely because of those political battle lines, Republicans on the Senate intelligence committee refused to participate in the panel’s three-year investigation of the CIA interrogation program, and most opposed Thursday’s decision.
Sen. Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, the committee’s ranking Republican, said in a statement that the report “contains a number of significant errors and omissions about the history and utility of CIA’s detention program.” He also noted that the review was done “without interviewing any of the people involved.”
The 9 to 6 vote indicates that at least one Republican backed the report, although committee officials declined to provide a breakdown.
Other GOP lawmakers voiced support for the report’s conclusions. Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), who was a prisoner of war in Vietnam, issued a statement saying that the committee’s work shows that “cruel” treatment of prisoners “is not only wrong in principle and a stain on our country’s conscience, but also an ineffective and unreliable means of gathering intelligence.”
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