First of all, whether or not torture worked or not is completely irrelevant to the question and nobody should be interested in that if the idea that it works as a reason or an excuse to do it then weve officially lifted the taboo on torture. Everyone who tortures claims they do it for good reason and yet its been banned under treaty, international law, including a treaty that Ronald Reagan signed, and championed actually, on the grounds that torture is never justifiable. [NOTE: like rape and slavery, torture is categorized, ethically, as intrinsic evil, in other words, always wrong, never justified by special circumstances and is categorically prohibited by international laws to which the US is a signatory – CAulds] Secondly the reason why Dick Cheney is able to go on meet the press, instead of being where he should be which is in the dock at The Hague or in a federal prison, is because President Obama and his administration made the decision not to prosecute any other people who implemented this torture regime – despite the fact that it was illegal and criminal, despite the fact that the US imprisons more of our population than any other country in the world, and so when you send the signal as the Obama administration did, that torture is not a crime that ought to be punished – its just a policy dispute that you argue about on Sunday shows – of course it emboldens torturers like Dick Cheney to go around and say what I did was absolutely right. And I have no idea how people think that given that we didn’t punish anybody for it, and given that large majorities of the population now believe in the virtue of torture… anyone thinks that will never happen again… of course it will happen again, and a big part of why is because we decided to shield the tortures instead of to prosecuting them. – Glenn Greenwald, 12/18/2014 youtu.be/BxNhWkdjx2Y
Posted on: Mon, 22 Dec 2014 11:14:05 +0000
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