Read it yourself. http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/h_cat39.htm
You have it backwards. The signatories are bound by it but not protected by it. The protection applies to everyone, regardless of nationality.
Who the hell is talking about moral leadership? Don’t all you lefties drink from the nihilistic foutain of moral equivalence. This is no morality.
In order to understand ANYTHING you need to know the context in which “it” resides. Otherwise, it’s all garbage in, garbage out. Obviously you’ve never taken(or passed) an elementary logic class.
“Resides” is not the same as “written in.”
You told us to look to Jefferson as a model for our behavior, who was scum. And the Left is far more concerned with moral behavior than the sociopaths of the Right.
As far as torture goes, torture is an act of monstrous evil, and anyone who engages in it should be tossed into prison for life or killed. Regardless of who they are or why they did it or who they did it to. If they flee to another country demand that they be turned over; if the other country refuses, send kidnappers or assassins to ensure they don’t escape. THAT’S my opinion of the morality of torture, and how it should be treated. Torture should never be permitted, and those who engage in it hunted down relentlessly, even across national borders and decades.
Oh, please. You said that you wanted the law to be interpreted using the context it was written in, which would render it backwards or useless. Which, of course is the point. As a typical right winger, you want to drag the world back to barbarism. Barbarism like torture.
You are missing an important piece here. The United States is subject to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (as are ALL United Nations members). That document says, in part: *Article 5 - No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.
*
As it happens that document is considered to be a part of customary international law.
Under customary international law there is the notion of a peremptory norm (aka jus cogens).
From that link:
I’d say the US is on the hook. Wiggle and squirm all you like.
Does it not occur to you how odd it is that over and over again the US has laws and is party to treaties and international agreements that prohibit torture yet the Bush administration had to pretzel itself to try and find one teeny loophole to allow torture?
Frankly the loophole is not even there. The legal basis for it has been thoroughly panned as faulty. So faulty they may consider State Bar proceedings to disbar the attorneys who wrote it.
Anyway, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is unambiguous. Do not torture anyone, under any circumstance.
To the OP:
As others have said I would draw him out in a debate. If you just “tell” him you will lose him.
Ask him how America was more “secure” by allowing torture. This seems to be a linchpin of his argument from which all else flows. We have done this around here and it is quite clear the US is less secure because of torture. Really.
As you engage with him you can note that torture is NOT effective…at all…as a means of gathering useful intelligence. Again, we have done that one around here with many, many cites.
Also point out to him that the Obama administration has explicitly said it will not prosecute the CIA people who actually performed the torture.
Uhh, any idiot would know “written in” is refering to the era, not the context on the words on paper, which would be redundant, especially obvious with the fact I used the word “was”, not “is”.
Well, here’s the thing: they aren’t prisoners of war. The Bush administration took great care in classifying Guantanamo detainees as “enemy combatants” rather than “prisoners of war” or even “criminal suspects”. Prisoners of war have rights under the Geneva Convention, rights such as access to legal counsel, a hearing before a judge, and things suchlike. An “enemy combatant”, on the other hand, can be held indefinitely, denied access to legal counsel, denied a hearing in open court, since there’s no definition of what an “enemy combatant” is, except that we’re sure it’s not the same thing as a “prisoner of war”.
We are indeed the most powerful nation in the world. And the world will judge us based on how we treat our enemies. We may decide to strut across the globe smashing them with our giant swinging dick, or we may treat them like human beings. One option appeases possible enemies, but the other creates them. Ask which he prefers.
They aren’t prisoners of war. If they were prisoners of war they’d be protected from criminal charges except for war crimes. POW certainly can’t be tortured. POWs are entitled to decent treatment and can be detained until the conflict is over, but must be released afterwards.
But we decided as a matter of policy that these detainees were not Prisoners of War, they were criminals. Very well then. If they are criminal terrorists, then they should be given a trial for their crimes, and if convicted sentenced to punishment. But said punishment does not include torture. They might be sentenced to life imprisonment, or imprisonment to a term of years, or even death. But without a trial, how do you know that someone is a criminal? How do you know that they did what they are accused of doing? Sentence first, trial afterwards might work in Wonderland, but this is America.
Its about the most fundamental rule in the Geneva Convention that prisoners of war are not common criminals and thus cannot be treated that way. And secondly tell you precocious little lad that the purpose of this is reciprocity, you don’t mistreat the other guys people, they don’t mistreat yours. Its not about being a “liberal”!
[Moderator Hat ON]
Caligulashorse, this is an official warning. Confine your insults to the BBQ pit.
[Moderator Hat OFF]
Ask him if he’s comfortable with the Obama administration secretly torturing people. Does he trust them to always act in the best interests of the country?
All the ammo you need for this discussion can be found in the following threads. They are long, to be sure, and some rehash already well worn ground but in the end they provide a great resource to answer all these questions and more.
Read them yourself or point your nephew to them (although he’d have to be really interested to wade through literally hundreds of posts on this).
Torture is most likely effective
It is illuminating that the writer juxtaposes “needlessly” and “tortured”. It tends to imply a belief that torture can ever be necessary.
This belief is an error.
Everyone who works for the CIA is presumably an adult, who knows this. They have a responsibility to behave in accordance with this fact, even in the face of “orders” or “policies” that attempt to absolve them of that responsibility.
This looks to be the key bit, here.
I would simply ask how he thinks the rest of the world is going to react if “the most powerful nation on the planet” doesn’t have to answer to the UN or anyone else. How will the US feel when China is the most powerful nation on the planet and thinks is doesn’t have to answer to anyone else. Have there been nations in the past who thought they were the most powerful and didn’t have to answer to anyone else, and how that went for them.
Your nephew is asking a great question, especially considering his background. He should be praised for that!
I can’t find the original source, but there’s a quote from one of the US soldiers who interrogated Nazi prisoners. I probably have to remind you and your nephew that the Nazis had conquered western Europe like lightning, and were a real and imminent threat to the existence of England as an independent nation. Had they conquered England, they were also a threat to the US. U boats were sinking US cargo ships like crezy in early 1942. The Nazis were much more of a threat than a score of maniacs with captured planes. Anyway, this interrogator is quoted as saying something like “I learned everything I needed to know from the Nazis by playing chess with them.”
While googling for that quote, I found the following article:
Ex-Interrogators Say Human Connection, Not Torture, Yields Results
Over and over again we find out that torture does not work. It does not provide accurate information. It takes more time to get even that wrong information than other techniques take to get correct information. Even if torture were as effective and efficient as portrayed on TV and in movies, it’s morally wrong and counter all of civilized behavior.
And would your nephew or his family trust Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, or Hillary Clinton with the kind of powers that GWB asserted?
Thanks so much for the responses guys. I appreciate it.
I’d say that this is an example of the question of the relationship between the people and the government. Does the government serve the people or do the people serve the government? If you believe the government serves the people than the government must be open and answerable to the people. The government works for the people and cannot tell the people something is none of their business. Everything the government does is the people’s business. And this includes the President, Congress, the Supreme Court, the CIA, the FBI, the armed forces, the police, the states, and every other government entity - none of them have any rights. The people have all the rights and the government can only do what the people allow it to do.
Could you find an example of a movie, novel, etc. wherein the bad guy says essentially this (possibly accompanied by an evil laugh or a paranoid glare)? Then explain that that’s what people become, or at least what they look like to the rest of the world, when they insist they can do whatever they want and don’t have to justify their actions to anybody.
Well said. One time-honored tactic of debating is to always answer an unfriendly question with another question- if you get bogged down in answering questions, you’ll at best maintain your own ground. To make progress, you have to ask questions.
Be friendly. Getting angry will just make you look irrational and dismissable.