Antonin Scalia says, "...it would be absurd to say you couldn't, I don't know, stick something under the fingernail, smack him in the face."

He also interestingly suggested that if all judges just went right back to the constitution, that would remove the political aspect of appointing judges.

i realize he's taking a shot at breyer (or whichever justice it is that quotes foreign precedent all the time) when he says:

"I don't look to their law, why do they look to mine?" he said. "We don't pretend to be Western mullahs who decide what is right and wrong for the whole world,"

but "why do they look to mine?" is the most offensive thing he said, much more than the cheeky 24 riffing -- foreigners look to "yours" because no other country has the means, or has given itself the right, to hold their fellow citizens indefinitely without recourse and torture them in the meantime. there's no way he doesn't know this.

In cases dealing with pretrial detainees rights, my recollection is that while the 8th Amdmt is not applicable, SCOTUS applied 14th amdmt due process reqmts to hold that those detainees must receive equivalent protections. i think its city of revere v. somebody

i also remember reading i think it was a thomas dissent where he argued that abysmal prison conditions don't violate 8th amendment, because prison conditions arent punishment, they're like, incidental. i'll see if i can find i was like !

i realize he's taking a shot at breyer (or whichever justice it is that quotes foreign precedent all the time)

It's Kennedy.

there's no way he doesn't know this.

i think he totally knows this, and doesn't understand why people in other countries would do such a thing.

worry about getting picked up and tortured? itisamystery.jpg

http://www.ocregister.com/newsimages/local/2005/08/30chapman.jpg
see theres no interpretation here im just going right back im going to the constitution the c-o-n-s-t-i-t-u-t-i-o-n dont you see me going to it going right back to it? god.

if you're a citizen or any country, who doesn't break the law, ever, why would you worry about getting picked up by the FBI for torturing people? do you really think the FBI goes around throwing people in the backs of vans and give people the lash? you've got about as much of chance as that happening as being in a plane crash, probably a lot less.

(not to say that the FBI imprisoning the wrong person doesn't happen. i just think it happens less often than you think.)

citizen of any country

the point is no one anywhere has a legal means of doing anything about it when it happens. sure it's an outside chance, but it's being justified by an even more outside and fictional chance: things that happen on television.

remember the woman from iceland who was strip searched and locked up at jfk for several hours, totally incommunicado, for overstaying a student visa by a few weeks, a decade ago? remember that? lucky for her someone decided she wasn't a threat. also, she was white. the point is the legal rabbit hole that people can be shoved into has a VERY wide opening and it goes very deep and dark very quickly.

but it's being justified by an even more outside and fictional chance: things that happen on television

yeah i agree the 24 comparison is fucked up.

but we're forgetting something...

Kind of a side point...

In the US, we have (or have historically had) two citizen classes: Full Citizens and Criminals. Full Citizens are guaranteed certain clearly-defined rights and protections. Criminals are a reduced-status subgroup: they lose some specific FC rights/protections, but retain the rest.

Suspects have in the past been seen as Full Citizens. They may be obligated to cooperate with certain procedures in order to retain FC status, but they are not a reduced-status subgroup, like Criminals.

During the Bush administration, it seems to me that there has been a big push on all fronts to create an entirely new citizen class composed of suspects and enemies of the state. This new class is portrayed as being so dangerous that they must be granted as few legal rights/protections as possible - ideally, none. It's understandable, but troubling, and I haven't seen it remarked on much.

I guess the bullet point there is Entirely New Citizen Class.

dont you wish this kind of shit was more bizarre and surprising instead of totally predictable

Mr. Que, have you ever actually read any of the stories of the Guantanamo detainees?

considering our armed forces basically passed out flyers in Afghanistan that amounted to "cartoony terrorist = big bag o' money," it's not that much of an outside chance

yes i have--i'm not saying that false imprisonment doesn't happen

i'm not saying that false imprisonment doesn't happen

-- Que

Then what are you saying? That we should simply accept them (and perhaps torture, perhaps murder) as the price of safety? 'Cuz the, "if you don't break the law, why would you worry about getting picked up by the FBI?" bit reads more like a threat than a reassurance.

Those of you who've stolen library books, beware.

Then what are you saying? That we should simply accept them (and perhaps torture, perhaps murder) as the price of safety? 'Cuz the, "if you don't break the law, why would you worry about getting picked up by the FBI?" bit reads more like a threat than a reassurance.

that's not what i'm saying.

how many people in the world do you think the US is throwing into vans and beating right now? can you ballpark it for me?

being drowned underneath a massive "wau cock"

could have done without this mental image

You mean secret renditions since 9/11? A couple hundred? At the very least.

the threat of terrorism is exaggerated
the threat of torturing innocent people is exaggerated

Agreed.

Look, in the past six years the U.S. has basically created the premise that it can invade any country it sees as linked to terrorism and then detain its citizens for any reason it pleases and without any process. That doesn't have the slightest thing to do with whether someone "breaks the law" -- there's no rule of law in that process at all.

que in commenting on the rarity of unlawful us detention i believe was responding to a poster up thread who was personally afraid of being kidnapped by the us government.

which in no way precludes him from being a heartless fascist himself. which he most certainly is!

totally hartless totally fascist: that's me

lol "hartless"

also OTM:

the threat of terrorism is exaggerated
the threat of torturing innocent people is exaggerated

in the past six years the U.S. has basically created the premise that it can invade any country it sees as linked to terrorism and then detain its citizens for any reason it pleases and without any process.

Hurting 2 OTM. Equally troubling is that this premise extends to US citizens as well. When suspected of "associating with" or "aiding" anyone even tenuously linked to terrorism, US citizens apparently lose all due process protections and citizen rights. This suspicion may even extend to Americans in general, allowing the government to suspend the rights of ALL citizens, e.g.: covert domestic wiretapping, etc.

also it's worth noting that this kind of thing hasn't happened more in part because it has been fought tooth and nail by organizations like the ACLU

the biggest problem no one's brought up w/ this torture argument is that there is no evidence that 'smacking someone in the face' or whatever actually gets a guilty person to spit out what they know

was gonna say surprised no one's said "uh, shit doesn't work, doggie."

that and its not possible to know if someone knows something and its unkind and it undermines our relations w/others

those are the four main problems

bring in the clean team!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/11/AR2008021100572_pf.html

It would be nice to know what fans of the "24" ticking time bomb scenario make of these other ridiculous hypotheses:

1) due to shonky intelligence you know that ONE out of FIVE people from the same building knows where the bomb is - the other four are innocent, but you don't know who is who. Do you torture all five to get the info?

2) you have a definite suspect this time but he's known to be a tough guy who's almost impervious to pain and bodily harm. However he's a real family man with a young daughter (who is innocent of all this bomb malarkey) - do you torture her in order to get him to fess up?

The admissions made by the men -- who were given food whenever they were hungry as well as Starbucks coffee at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba

3) If SUPERMAN knows where the ticking time-bomb is, can you use kryptonite?

the biggest problem no one's brought up w/ this torture argument is that there is no evidence that 'smacking someone in the face' or whatever actually gets a guilty person to spit out what they know

This is too easy. Anyone who's ever had a little brother knows that the judicious application of discomfort can produce aggreeable results. Torture and mistreatment do work, at least some of the time, and that's why they've been so popular throughout human history. There are negative consequences, sure, but pretending that torture doesn't work is the wrong approach here.

i hope to christ above they mean the bottled stuff. xp.

altho, gtmo has been a military base for a century before getting famous as a detention camp. ok i'm not surprised at all there's a starbucks .

torture does not produce reliable information and this has been proven statistically time and time again

This is too easy. Anyone who's ever had a little brother knows that the judicious application of discomfort can produce aggreeable results. Torture and mistreatment do work, at least some of the time, and that's why they've been so popular throughout human history. There are negative consequences, sure, but pretending that torture doesn't work is the wrong approach here.

-- contenderizer, Wednesday, February 13, 2008 11:00 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Link

not really dude. if someone's willing to blow up a city why would he suddenly flip because he gets hurt? + people are known to confess to crimes they have NOT committed when tortured, so how can you know the confession is real?

I think contenderizer is partly right here. Saying that torture NEVER works is facile and wrong. It's more like torture might sometimes work but is also very likely to produce false confessions and the situations in which it's used are never as cut-and-dry as "this person will reveal the key to the secret plot to blow up LA" (let alone the lol ticking bomb)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A2302-2005Jan11.html

the argument is more - tortue produces enough bad info to render the good info unusable

"I find it curious that in the debate involving the so-called "ticking bomb" scenario, there has been a pre-supposition that physical, psychological, and/or emotional coercion will compel a source to provide actionable intelligence, the only issues in contention being those legal and moral arguments in favor or in opposition. To the best of my knowledge, there is no definitive data to support that supposition and considerable historical evidence to suggest the contrary."

- Former USAF interrogator Steven M. Kleinman's Statement before the Senate 9/25/07

Returning to the matter at hand:

"I'm very tender," he said.

Thomas Hilde Testimony: Unreliable, Torture Must Be Used Broadly

Thomas Hilde testifies at Helsinki Commission hearing.

Recent advocates of torture use claims of necessity and the moral importance of information it can provide as a justification. Yet information gained from torture is "notoriously unreliable," and so in practice torture is rarely an isolated procedure, says University of Maryland research professor Thomas Hilde, who edited the forthcoming book, On Torture. He specializes in international social, political and environmental ethics.

Advocates invoke the "ticking time bomb" as an example of the need for torture - often the hypothetical case of a terrorist who has planted a nuclear dirty bomb and must be tortured to reveal its location before it explodes. Hilde rejects this example as a "crude utilitarian justification for the use of torture: torturing one bad man vs. saving many innocent people...More likely...is the case of torturing many innocent people in search of what might justify the act of torture."

To be effective, torture must be used broadly in order collect patterns of information as a means of corroborating bits of data. Single bits of coerced information must be verified. "How does one know when one has meaningful or true information?" Hilde asks. "The information must... be previously unknown in order to justify using torture. Yet, its moral significance must also be previously known in order to justify the act."

Torture becomes institutionalized, Hilde maintains, by the very logic of information-gathering. "There must be trained interrogators/torturers and thus also trainers, a legal and administrative apparatus, a cadre of doctors and lawyers and data analysts, and others, all of whom would be required to suspend their moral decency...We end up with a swelling institution in search of its moral justification, causing increasing damage to innocents and ourselves, all in search of the supreme moral justification - the time bomb - only to find that, in the end, it is we who have become the moral equivalent of the time bomb."

Thomas Hilde
Research Professor
University of Maryland School of Public Policy
Contact: (202) 321-7384 (cell); thi✧✧✧@u✧✧.e✧✧