WASHINGTON (AP) — Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is joining the debate over the Senate's torture report by saying it is difficult to rule out the use of extreme measures to extract information if millions of lives were threatened.Well, fuck, Antonin; good job of answering... what? certainly no question anyone actually asked.
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Scalia says nothing in the Constitution appears to prohibit harsh treatment of suspected terrorists.
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| Scalia exemplifies original dyspepsia |
In short, it does not matter whether the Constitution of the United States explicitly prohibits torture: torture is wrong anyway, from a moral AND a strategic standpoint.
Is one Texas GOP asshole who occupied the White House for eight years sufficient to overturn two centuries of moral tradition that the US does not engage in torture? And why does an ancient and far from venerable Supreme Court Justice feel compelled to advocate torture publicly?
Scalia is 78 years old and reportedly very religious. Please forgive me if I hope his God calls him home before he incites too many more zealots in the CIA, NSA, FBI and DHS (to name just a few) to grotesque acts in the name of the people of the United States of America.
Say WHAT?! Someone erased the 8th Amendment out of his copy of the Constitution or somethin'? SIGH.
ReplyDelete'Tux, one commenter on the TPM thread mentions that, suggesting that Scalia's "reasoning" is that the 8th Amendment is only about punishment after conviction, not about the (due?) process that leads to conviction; therefore (!?) torture is OK by the 8th Amendment as long as it isn't prescribed as a punishment consequent to conviction. The commenter was pointing out how (ahem) tortuous the logic can become in Tony's attempt to wring a desired result from a Constitution which he (thank Dog) did not help to write.
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