Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton

 
Joho the Blog: The murky ground for torture.  [originally posted 2004-05-06-11:36 -0700]  Where is our stand for who we are in the world and for ourselves?  Especially ourselves.  I don't want that to be something that considers any right circumstance for torture. I don't see how it could be written into the military code in a way that makes it clear what the conditions (immediately-urgent and short-lived) and consequences must be.  And I don't think one can frame an ethical justification.  Even if we could, I think it is socially more powerful to simply have torture be unacceptable under all circumstances.

Either way, I am completely willing to take the affirmative response to David's questions: "Can we as a nation say that we abhor torture, except in the rarest of cases? That we do not believe in the institutionalizing of torture? That we will fight it around the world? That we believe in the rule of law and that no one is above the law? That we believe in treating even our enemies with dignity? That we support the established international conventions for treating prisoners? That we are sorry about what went on at Abu Ghraib?"

I suppose one way to make our stand perfectly clear on that would be to accept the jurisdiction of the World Court, at last, and end the craziness about no law but our law, when we feel like it.  The hypocrisy of our fears and distrust is rotting the American soul.
posted by Dennis at 5/5/2004 03:20:36 PM