Quote:
Originally posted by Not Bob
Ah, but that's where you are wrong, cynical sebby with the cash register heart. We are different, and even if we haven't always lived up to the promises of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, we've always tried to. Or we at least had the decency to pretend to.
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You're killing me, you know that... I'd say you found a weak spot, but I've what - 15, 16 Achilles Heels? I have some principles, goddammit.
You're right that we do need to follow those documents, and I won't parse them to suggest some verbiage allows what we're doing, even if it did (I also won't parse them because Ty will, and I'm lazy). I think that's a lousy argument. I think the spirit of those documents, read in total, supported a lot of things we find inhuman these days (how many of the authors kept slaves?) and don't find very persuasive the suggestion they ban outright the waterboarding of an enemy combatant who aims to kill American civilians. Or waterboarding a suspect we have decent reason to believe might be involved in such acts. There's no way I can buy into that notion, and any plain language you could offer from a founder suggesting the proper way to handle enemy combatants would be woefully outdated and dealing with a style of war seen as comical since the mid-19th century.
I think the torture thing is the spot where considerations of law crumble in the face of the need to survive and succeed against an enemy. It's not right, but neither is any killing for benefit of your country over someone else. If we're going to kill a lot of people to protect ourselves, we might as well do it full bore and be over with it.
BUT, I am with you on feeling troubled that some of Bush's attitude toward foreign combatants' rights could trickle into domestic policy. So far, however, based in the John Walker Lind case, it seems the proper safeguards are working. If he's only doing 20 yrs, we're still protecting our own liberties sufficiently.
