Do You Want Obama to pursue Prosecution For Torture

Its not that abstract. Its that they aren't the same thing.

Anyway I am being absolute with the law, torture shouldn't be legally allowed, but my argument isn't that torture is never justified only that anyone who does should be prepared to stand trial and make the case why they thought it was justified.

You aren't being absolutist but you are carving a legal loophole. I mean there are cases where premeditated murder might be justifed but does that mean we should carve a legal loophole for premeditated murder.

 

Problem is that with torture, a lot of it is clandestine, so how can you bring it to trial? If that is the case, foreign gov'ts will be reluctant to turn over certain people.

I don't think a trial by the judicial branch is the right solution - unless it's done in secret and by say the Supreme Court. Military Tribunals are usually a joke. So what sort of trial is right?

I think, on presidential order, that is, on direct order from the president, a suspect should be allowed to be tortured for purposes of national security. If it requires a judge to show that there is evidence that the asset is indeed of value to national security - then so be it. I think that should be sufficient to prevent abuse - would you agree?

 

No. Torture is never justified or justifiable in a civilized society. If our soldiers were waterboarded (and in fact, when they WERE waterboarded in WWII), Americans from sea to shining sea would be DEMANDING justice for the torturer.

 

Are you equating one of our soldiers to a member of Al Qaeda?

Think of it this way, how would you feel if Timothy McVeigh actually conducted an attack against a foreign country, and they caught him and tortured him to see if he had collaborators?

Would you get all up an arms and defend him? Do you think other Americans would?

 

Whatever. I guess some people will torture logic until physical torture is justified.

TORTURE IS WRONG, NO MATTER WHO IS DOING IT, WHAT IT IS BEING DONE FOR, OR WHO IT IS BEING DONE TO.

 

American Hero Joe Galloway (We Were Soldiers Once...And Young) lays the smack down on Bush, Obama, and Congressional Republicans about this issue.

 

No - he's equating torture to... torture. Are you suggesting it is ethical for us to torture to save lives, but not ethical for other countries to torture to save lives?

Depends if you believe in the rule of law, or just determine legal justice by feelings, I guess.

 

I think when a nation faces issues which threaten it's existences, any means to address it are on the table.

Look, I respect the folks who oppose torture. I do. I respect Mahatma Gandhi too. But just like Gandhi wouldn't eat bacon if it meant he could save a thousand lives, neither would some people here slap someone if it would do the same thing. That just doesn't make sense to me.

How do you justify not being able to use physical interrogation to save the LIVES of many people? What happened at Abu Garib was terrible and should have never been allowed to happen. But don' tover react and tie the hands of those who are responsible for defending us. Sometimes dirty things must be done.

Hopefully that day will come to an end. But that day hasn't arrived.

 

It is an established principal that following an unlawful order isn't an excuse so torture on a direct order of the president I don't think is an acceptable reason for carving a legal loophole, with one exception.

I don't know if you're asking for a judge to issue a warrant for torture and I would have to think about that. I will still stand by opinion that if someone chooses to torture then they should be prepared to face the legal consequences of it.

 

Has anyone posted this Glenn Greenwald article yet?

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/05/01/shifts/index.html

 

Yes, I was thinking of a warrant.

But remember I don' think it would be an unlawful order since I am saying the law should be constructed that on certain orders torture would be allowed.

 

Mr Dodd has a point



Sen. Chris Dodd took some noticeably hard shots at the White House in a recent interview with Connecticut bloggers, ridiculing the Obama officials who decided to release documents showing the Bush administration authorized torture without having the political will to follow up with an investigation or prosecution.

"I don't know who the genius was in the room that night when they were discussing this," the Connecticut Democrat said of the four torture documents declassified by the Obama White House. "But if you are going to make the decision to release the documents, I presume every one of us here would the have a follow up question, which is: Well, what are you going to do about it? And if the answer is nothing, we are just going to release the documents.... Some of us in the room would say, 'Well wait a minute, you have a problem. If you are going to release them then you are going to have to answer the next question, what are you going to do with them?'"

Dodd said that he definitively believed waterboarding to be torture and added that if "people did do something illegal it ought to be pursued." He did not have a preferred avenue for pursuing investigations into the matter, though spoke somewhat favorably of Sen. Patrick Leahy's proposal for an independent body to handle the matter.

But it was his comments aimed at the president that were the most biting. Though Obama noted that his hands were tied when it came to the document release -- his White House had to comply with a Freedom of Information Act request from the ACLU -- the fact that the president remains un-eager to pursue potential illegal activity struck Dodd as antithetical to basic American principles.

"I know people don't want to go back, because it is uncomfortable. The president has said I want to look forward," he said. "You know my father was a prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials. They were not a popular idea.... Nuremberg became a symbol of who we were. Even these thugs got a lawyer, even these thugs got a trial despite their acts. And so we became a symbol of jurisprudence and the rule of law."

"Not to prosecute people or pursue them when these acts occur is, in a sense, to invite them again," Dodd concluded.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/05/05/dodd-ridicules-genius-in_n_197060.html

 

not quite- they could have asked the SC to review, but didn't. another (ineffectual) punt/straddle by the O-house.

 

Just last week you were whining about the government wasting 300k of your tax dollars, now you are saying that they should have spent time and money (with a value probably more than $300k) filing a petition for cert, and if granted (unlikely), briefing a supreme court argument on a FOIA request tthat they were going to lose anyway, about documents that contained information that was largely already public anyway.

Not a punt - that's what's called the right decision purely from a cost benefit analysis, not even considering the abhorrence of defending illegal torture.

 

You seem to be confused. The last admin was the one that believed in obstructionism just for the sake of it.

 

they've defended Bush's method's before, why not now?

 

Because they decided it wasn't worth the trouble in this case.

 

Focus Shifting To Evidence Bushies Ordered Torture To Boost Case For Iraq War

At last, the torture debate looks to be heading toward what's been the big question lurking in the background all along: was the Bush administration using torture in large part to make a political case for the invasion of Iraq?

 

It's sick how the notion that they accelerated "leaning" on prisoners in Abu Ghraib and possibly Gitmo has become so mainstream and yet there's no way of ever bringing them to trial over it.