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Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
(1) They should recover for the same reasons that other tort victims should recover.
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But, recover from whom? SH? I hear he's broke. The Iraqi people? They've got their own butcher's bill to submit. A central concept of tort law (well, in the olden days) was that you can only recover from a tortfeasor. If these guys should prevail, why should any government go along with the odious debt concept and cancel Iraq's debts incurred for the aggrandizement of SH?
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(2) More importantly (to me, anyway) is the principle of vindicating these rights. The position our government is taking adds up to less than full opposition to torture. I have no idea whether it's because of the optics of the juxtaposition of this and Abu Ghraib, or what, but it's wrong.
You have posted in the past about how people want their government to reflect their values, regardless of the efficacy of a policy initiative. Well, here you go. Whether or not it really helps these vets to get money as compensation for what they endured, the bigger point here is the moral one. We ought to be against torture.
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We are against torture. We deposed SH partly on that basis. In other words, we got the "social justice" that the plaintiffs claimed to be seeking already. Now, you want the co-victims to pay for our guys' verdicts? I can't reconcile a discussion of rights with that approach. If Joe runs me down with his car, yeah, I should have a "right" to compensation, but not from Sally, who Joe ran over last week. The "right" doesn't trump the "just".
