
Originally Posted by
excon
If we DON'T agree with the laws, and we only obey them when its convenient, then let's have THAT system.
You already do that, by yoiur own admission, vis-à-vis drugs... specifically marijuana. You have said on any number of occasions that you ignore the laws vis-à-vis marijuana because you don't believe them to be fair, just, whatever. You clearly only obey laws that you find convenient and disobey them if they don't suit you.
You know who else thinks our country is better than us?? That would Ronald Reagan. In fact, if you adopted Reagan's views on torture, you would be called a rabid score settler from the hard left. You'd be a Bush hater.
To wit: Convention Against Torture, signed and championed by Ronald Reagan, Article II/IV:
"No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture. . . Each State Party shall ensure that all acts of torture are offences under its criminal law."
Interestingly enough, though, Ronald Reagan's CIA tortured captured KGB agents and other foreign combatants captured by the USA. And that was REAL torture, not the so-called "torture" used at Gitmo.
Reagan was nothing if not a realist.
It's certainly true, of course, that Ronald Reagan was very pre 9/11, but the concept of a uniquely scary Islamic terrorists was hardly unknown. Our client, the Shah of Iran was overthrown by them in 1979 and they occupied our embassy; we funded and supported them in Afghanistan in the early 1980s; 280 U.S. Marines were killed by them in Lebanon in 1982; Jewish community centers in Argentina were exploded by them in 1984; and Reagan himself invoked their Grave Threat in order to justify the American bombing of Libya in 1986 where we killed the adopted infant daughter of its leader. We were bombing, occupying, interfering in and trying to control Muslim countries way back then, too.
Yet even with all those Islamic terrorists running around, Reagan insisted that torture could never be justified under any circumstances and that those who do it must be criminally prosecuted.
Excon
No... he left it to the CIA to deal with.
Furthermore, you ignore the definition of torture defined in Article I of the convention:
"For the purposes of this Convention, torture means any act by which
severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason
based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity.
It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions."
What was done at Gitmo did not constitute "
severe pain and suffering", and was not "
based on descrimination of any kind". There was no descrimination involved, and the "pain and suffering" was anything but severe, as seen from the memos themselves. Furthermore, these actions DID arise only from "lawful sanctions" as defined by the Department of Justice under the Bush Administration, and as seen in the memos.
Reagan would have had absolutely NO PROBLEM WHATSOEVER with what was done in Gitmo, because it didn't constitute torture under any definition, and certainly not under the UN Convention Against Torture.
Elliot