Could you expand on this comment? I’m sure you don’t mean that Libya, Cuba and China have come out in favor of the UN exempting the US from inspections and focusing instead on Libya, Cuba and China?
“Dreadful anti-Israel bias”
Hardly. The UN resolved the Sheba Farms dispute on Israel’s side. Annan has consistently condemned Palestinian terror attacks. A decade ago the UN reversed the “Zionism is racism” vote.
The Sheba Farms decision,in particular, is of far greater practical importance than any anti-Israel activity carried out by some Arab nations at UN meetings.
About the long list of things the UN has failed to do, it is precisely because it has not been given the tools to enforce basic human rights around the world ( and of course there are limits to how much the UN can change the policies of sovereing governments) . The anti-torture proposal would be a small step in the direction of more robust UN intervention so it’s inconsistent to use those “failures” as counter-arguments.
december, it would help if you paid attention to what’s going on here. Just a bit further up in this page you can see the following quote: The anti-torture proposal enjoys wide support among Western European and Latin American countries. But conservative Muslim states that shun outside intervention are likely to back the U.S. request in order to stave off a vote. Other opponents include Cuba, China and Nigeria.
If, by your reasoning, voting against such countries is good no matter what, then being on their side must be bad, no matter what.
You obviously have no clue about the topic under discussion. Please inform yourself before spouting your generic, good-for-any-thread-and-any-subject support for American jingoism.
It would seem that wars would be more effectively fought if etiquette were left out of the equation. It really is pointless. If you are disregarding the usual moral laws concerning murder, why regard the others? It just gets in the way of the purposes of war, seemingly, the destruction of an enemy.
A note on torture:
Torture that is not needed should be avoided. However, in regard to the terrorists in custody, torture might be a useful tool in gathering information. Let us examine the ethics, shall we? These people have taken away, or tried to take away, far more from society than they will ever give back. This being the case, why do they deserve the protection of ethical rules? It would seem that they have chosen a different ethical spectrum. We are talking about people with no respect for us or our ethical spectrum, that seek our destruction. I don’t see any reason to be nice. It would be far more efficient to use effective torture methods, non-lethal mind you, we want to keep them alive if possible, to obtain our information. Do we really want to wait until they, in the goodness of their hearts, choose to tell us everything? Why not beat it out of them, in a sense? Personally, I don’t think that most people deserve to be classified as “human,” in the sense that humans are considered above animals. Terrorists, at least in the case of all the terrorist organizations I have encountered, certainly do not deserve the classification. They are animals that are doing the exact opposite of what even animals should do. They have chosen to kill for…what is their motivation exactly? That always escapes me. In any case, if you’ll pardon the rambling nature of this post and explain to me why we shouldn’t use torture as a method for gathering information, I would appreciate it.
And please remind me what, if any, sanctions the US has put on China due to human rights abuses. None. In fact, trade agreements have been divorced from human rights records since the Clinton administration. The sanctions against Cuba have nothing to do with human rights, and more to do with loud Cuban exiles in Miami and the nationalization of US businesses on the island.
IMO, I feel the US should just stop signing international treaties unless it is completely and utterly within its benefit to do so. I see no benefit to this treaty for the US. I see no benefit to the ICC. I see no benefit to Kyoto’s binding restrictions. The US should never have signed any of them and I, for one, am glad that they have been taken off the table. I am also of the opinion that NATO has outlived its usefulness and should be disbanded.
OTOH, I feel that WTO was not too bad. I also feel that NAFTA is good and that the NAAEC should be strengthened and the mechanism allowing one party to bring instances of lax environmental enforcement of another party to the attention of an arbitration panel for a ruling. I support the UN, as well, in many of its functions.
>> in regard to the terrorists in custody, torture might be a useful tool in gathering information.
You are in agreement with the most barbaric governments of the world including the worst enemies of the US. No civilised country would defend such a thing. Certainly not the US.
Mandos,
Your rambling format might be pardonable, but your content on the other hand!?!?! For-the-love-all-blessed-creatures-that-have-ever-walked-on-earth check yourself a little before you post. Anyway, why not torture? Three reasons, two moral and one practical:
Morally
-
By almost every moral code there is it is not acceptable to inflict pain on a defenseless human being no matter what they have done.
-
Even if it would be… what if it’s the wrong guy?
Practically
Information retrieved through torture or duress tends to be wrong since most people will say any old shit just to get the pain to stop. Therefore it is more likely that you end up with what the torturer wanted to hear rather than any so called ‘truth’.
Does that answer it?
Sparc
If it is morally wrong to inflict pain, why do many of us in civilized countries tend to cry for revenge when someone does something that breaks a moral law of special importance? Surely such people want to inflict pain, and it has everything to do with what they have done. Are such reactions uncivilized, and if so why? There are always subtleties in such arguments that many tend to ignore. We want a black and white ethical spectrum, but we don’t have one. We sometimes have one when it comes to the actions of others but never ourselves. As for it being “the wrong guy”…that doesn’t stop us from throwing people in prison, does it? Are we talking about reasonable doubt or just doubt? You assume that our ethical spectrum extends to all humans. Yet, we treat animals in a different manner than humans, yes? We do not have to be kind to animals, yet we must be kind to all humans. However, what if there is no important difference between the man and beast? Doesn’t human to animal ethics come into play? If not, why not? My main concern would be with the practical objections, not the moral ones until I can fully understand why it is so wrong to torture in order to obtain information that might save the lives of possibly thousands. Would you suggest that, if it could save a billion people, and torture is the only way to obtain the information in time, that we should be more concerned with the moral objections to torture than with those billion innocent lives?
Gotta agree with that. It wastes your time and annoys the dog.
Anyway…I believe the US should support the measure–as well as require everyone else to bring their prisons up to US standards. Think about it…if you had to go to prison, and could pick the country where the prison is, which country would you choose? (Well, maybe Canada.)
If other countries had to bring their prisons up to US standards, it would be like the downfall of Communism all over again. Other countries would bust their budgets just trying to build a tenth of the prisons we have. They’d go bankrupt, and we’d corner the penitentiary market.
Those countries that couldn’t afford it just wouldn’t sign the treaty. And then, they’d do it substandard and cheaper and take our penitentiary industry away…just like autos and textiles.
The reason the United States does not, as a rule (practice might be different) use torture is that it has been shown to be ineffective. People will say whatever you want them to say to get you to stop, and will make things up until they come up with something you believe.
As to why POWs are and should be treated differently from common criminals, it is because they are not criminals. They are young men either coerced into serving or expressing their patriotism. The American soldiers who have been captured by foreign governments did not deserve to be treated as criminals, and the US should not act as if it has the only legitimate patrioism in the world.
And by the way, ** Latro**, the Germans didn’t need to see any German corpses to start shooting prisoners, especially on the slavic front.
OK, Mandos and everybody else, please let us keep this thread centered. This is not a thread about whether torture is admissible or ethical. The US does categorically NOT admit torture and it is outlawed in the US constitution. If you want to defend torture of prisoners, please start another thread; preferably in the pit, and I’l tell you my view.
This thread is about whether it is in the long term insterests of the US and of Humanity at large that the US go along with the protocol mentioned in the OP. I say it is.
I am not so sure that the US dislike of the aforementioned protocol is specifically to do with Gitmo. It appears to me to be a symptom of a wider unilateralist and anti-UN stance the Bush administration is taking, either due to its own innate conservatism, or pandering to the paranoid attitude of the US right; which attitude is perfectly summed up by december’s post on the previous page.
So how is it in the long term interests of the US to go along with this side agreement? I see no benefit.
You see no benefit in participating in actions leading to erredicate torture? Would you see the benefit if you were one of those suffering torture?
It could be worse … the US at least absteined from voting on the amendment … lil ol’ Australia voted against it. :mad:
Simpleton, you actually have no idea whether or not your government tortures people, you simply have blind faith in your Authorities. You keep refering to “we” as though you, your government and the rest of the US people were of one mind. You are right of course America does not have to cooperate with other nations, but then by the SAME logic, neither does Iraq. America has no choice but to change its attitude to its allies and supranational instituions or face long term damage to credibility and relationships with other nations. It is up to the American people to demonstrate to their government they are not afraid to be part of a more open and hopefully equitable world order.
Your attitude is frightening in at it shows just how ignorant and uncultured you surely must be. I pity you for your arrogance and insecurity.
“The state is the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it lies, too; and this lie creeps from its mouth: ‘I, the state, am the people.’”
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1885.
Do you imagine the above to be the only countries to have comitted crimes against humanity? Do you actually believe the US deals only with those who grant their own people the limited liberty and democracy America grants its own? You must be ignorant of your governments involvement in Cuba, Nicaragua, Colombia, Chilli, Guatamala, Saipan, Iraq a few decades ago, el salvador, etc. America and europe have been involved in the middle east and asia for some time and they don’t deal solely with democracies.
They may not admit that their actions are human rights abuses, but I am sure that they have admitted to actions which we consider to human rights abuses. If China actually does claim the Tiennanamen Square Massacre didn’t happen, I’d like to see a cite of that.
Well, they can. And the US can refuse. Look, just because you can draw some parrellism between the US and China, that doesn’t mean that the US is being hypocritical. The Nazis claimed they were on the right side. The Americans claimed they were on the right side. Were the Americans hypocritical for refusing to recognize the Nazi’s position, while using force to promote their own view?
But that’s not what the US is saying. The US wants to be allowed to inspect the prisons of other countries. It’s already allowed to inspect the prisons of the US, so it’s not asking for anything that it doesn’t abide by. There’s nothing hypocritical about “I think I’m right, so not only do I think I should follow my rules, I think you should too”. Pressuring someone else to accept your values does not obligate you to accept someone else’s request to accept their values.
I still can’t figure out why the hell the US allows the UN to make their HQ there. They need to tell the UN to pack up and get the hell out and most of all withdraw their membership from the UN.
Screw 'em!