Quote:
Originally Posted by spence
Both Federal and International law consider torture criminal and I don't think there can be any doubt that the law was broken. We went way beyond even water boarding.
Don't worry though, it's never going to happen.
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Spence, I deeply respect your willingness to discuss your views and defend them. But I have no respect for your views on law. When you can silently stand by the political and judicial trashing of the supreme law of our land, saying you've read the Constitution several times but still can't understand it, and abide the skirting of it by politicians if you agree with their agenda, and accept judicial "interpretations" of it which twist it out of all recognition, then flatly say that when it comes to torture, "I don't think there can be any doubt that the law was broken", you lose me.
The law of our land, OUR land, not the world's, is and has been broken over and over again to further agendas you approve of. You have said that the Constitution is outdated.
Well guess what. International "law" is full of biases which in many cases contradict the principles on which OUR law was founded. And it outdates itself with new conventions too often to be recognizable, much less viable.
If you wish to be a citizen of the world, that's nice. If possible. Citizens of the world have no overriding law. They can only abide by the laws of the lands they visit. I presume, if you wish to be a citizen of the world, you would abide by the various laws of Islamic countries, communist countries, theocratic societies, oppressive regimes as well as liberal ones. You have eclectic tastes, so I assume that would suit you.
When we have that "balance" of law which is concocted into reality by the diverse and contradictory states which make up the international "community," we have a myth, a dream (or nightmare) code most of which is alien in some respect to the different people and their communities it purportedly represents.
And guess what again. Many of the countries you, as a citizen of the world, would visit, will not respect that international law as it applies to you if it will not accord with what they want to do to you. And if they are reviewed by an international court of justice vis a vis their treatment of you, they will twist the so-called international law to suit what they have done to you. And that will be the end of it.
So when it comes to law, if you cannot even respect the law of your own country, what is the honor or high ground of supposedly respecting a United Nations law?
Well guess what again. When a chain of abuses against your law transforms it into something which pretends to be a higher ground, but which flies against the face of reality, and makes a people who once had inalienable rights into a herd of sheep which is granted only what its master gives it, then what, exactly, are you a citizen of? What is international law then, other than an even higher form of tyranny compounded by the rest of the world's tyrannies, on top of the one you have become sheep to?
And yes, the reality is that it's going to happen again. Throughout the world. There doesn't need to be a law against torture. There are two kinds of relevant codified laws. Those which in aggregate place the individual above the state. And those which place the state above the individual. And there is the other law, the uncoded law by which we, at our most basic level, exist. And it is that unwritten law by which we operate in threat of extinction. Cruel as it may seem, that law has no bounds. To bind it with restrictions is to render it null.
That is the hypocrisy of laws against torture. And it begins with the word itself. In civil law the notion of torture melds into criminal behavior of varied violence perpetrated by persons against each other. Most of those assaults can be characterized as a form of torture. So the word loses its meaning other than some sadistic treatment by mentally disturbed psychotics. Any treatment, however,no matter how cruel or unusual, which is rationally used to prevent deadly violence against your society, pales in comparison to the wars we wage for the same cause. To say killing your enemy is acceptable, but imposing cruel pain to him in order to prevent more killing is a contradiction which flies in the face of even the "higher ground" argument.