"The United States participated actively and effectively in the negotiation of the Convention . It marks a significant step in the development during this century of international measures against torture and other inhuman treatment or punishment. Ratification of the Convention by the United States will clearly express United States opposition to torture, an abhorrent practice unfortunately still prevalent in the world today.
The core provisions of the Convention establish a regime for international cooperation in the criminal prosecution of torturers relying on so-called 'universal jurisdiction.' Each State Party is required either to prosecute torturers who are found in its territory or to extradite them to other countries for prosecution."
[via Sullivan]
8 comments:
Everyone who has a blog needs to post that everywhere.
It's going up on the keg tomorrow.
Absolutely! This is a real constitutional crisis, not for some bullshit like Obama's birth. In my opinion, the US Government is no longer accountable to the people. To quote the illustrious Thomas Jefferson:
Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new GovernmentThe time is coming.
It is a good quote, but my guess is that the torture cheerleaders will respond with one of the following arguments:
a) What the US has done is not torture, it is "enhanced questioning" or some other bullshit.
b) It is justified because:
i. The terrorists want to destroy us.
ii. They will blow up all of our cites.
iii. We don't want the terrorists to win.
c. Reagan was wrong on this.
To be fair, it is probably possible to find something bad or contradictory on almost any important historical figure. I haven't seen many people change their mind on this and my guess is that the same people that think it is ok won't be convinced by a quote from Reagan.
Clearly, Ronald Reagan hates America.
The other statements that Sullivan linked to from that Convention document are the following:
"For the purposes of this Convention, torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted..."
and:
"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."
I am not at all well-versed in legal-ease and all that, but these statements seem pretty unequivocal to me. So all I think is left is:
"Reagan was wrong on this."
There are other issues delaing with Executive power, but I am sure the lawyers were able to somehow come up with a way to say that waterboarding does not fall within the definition. I think it is BS, but I don't work for the OLC and they didn't ask me.
Whoa, Otto Man is back from the grave and ready to party!
steves,
The only viable option is "a". Even Bush maintained the bullshit facade of "the United States does not torture" for years. Now that all the torture fetishists are aroused, Cheney & Co are less inclined to play that coy, but the purpose of all the memos was to re-define torture into a "by any other name" category.
That way they can also keep Reagan immune from criticism.
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