Torture is a matter of intent & not the extent of pain & suffering
If the President of the United States or leader of any country believes it is in the interest of that nation to pull out a person's fingernails or burying alive the child of a detainee to extract information- The only rule of law is that of the laws which protect the President or other members of the executive or members of the ruling regime of any country.Whatever the King decrees is by definition legal and moral. When lawyers work for a dictator or king they bend the law to suit the King or President. The law is merely a tool to be used by those in power to justify their power , their actions and their whims. The law therefore has little to do with justice or with protecting the weak and the innocent.
These members of the Bush regime are unable to differentiate between right and wrong and legal or ilegal. It seems they believe if something is legal then it is ok . As we know under Hitler many vile and horrifying actions were according to the Nazi Party legal and therefore justified. But the rulings at the Nuremberg trials mad a distinction between that which is legal and that which is immoral, unethical as an affront to human conscience and therefore wrong and evil.
They ( Yoo and Addington ) seem to suggest that torture and even burying someone's child alive would be ok in certain circumstances. So much for Conservatives and the religious right and their claim to have more respect and regard for human life .When Saddam did such things it was considered to be torture but when Americans do such things it is some sort of justifiable and even holy act.
They also seem to imply that if one causes someone a great deal of physical pain for no particular reason or in fact gets pleasure from inflicting physical or psychological harm then it might be called torture. So the only question we should ask of the Grand Inquisitor Torquemada or whomever is whether or not he enjoyed inflicting pain on his prisoners.
The Real News Network
American News Project: D.C. SNAPSHOT - On June 26, 2008, John Yoo and David Addington, two leading architects of the Bush administration's policies on torture, testified before the House Judiciary Committee. Even seemingly simple questions yielded evasive answers.
Book of note which I am currently reading The Terror Dream by Susan Faludi pub. 2007.
Faludi offers the thesis that of Men who are the capable rescuers of women in peril. This she claims is an ongoing mythology going back to the Old West and the so-called Indian wars back to 1500's which persisted up to recent times. She uses the film The Searchers as the paradigm for this American myth of manly men rescuing their femine helpless women in distress. In such a mythology there is no room for capable independent women who are not in need of being protected or rescued by manly men. There is also little if any room for women who are just as capable as men and who also able to act as heroes , protectors and rescuers. This trumped up phony myth permeates the post 9/11 American culture.
and so it goes,
GORD.
No comments:
Post a Comment