It’s hard to believe that a Supreme Court Justice can have such a poor understanding of his own country’s Constitution that he professes that the 8th amendment doesn’t apply to foreigners. Actually, what am I saying? Justice Scalia, Dick Cheney’s hunting buddy and probably Darth Vader’s ugly aborted twin is the pinnacle of Neoconservatism and by whom has the Constitution of the United States been completely forgotten, ignored, trashed and otherwise trampled over other than by the Neocons?
In a recent BBC Interview, Antonin Scum-Bag Scalia actually argues that torture may be legal! I’ll repeat that just to make sure we got it: Justice Scalia, a Supreme Court Judge, says that it may be legal to torture someone. Then please, can someone, somewhere, explain to me why we in the West have railed for years about other countries doing it and have invoked something called ‘Human Rights?’ I mean, what rights do humans have if it is permissible to torture them?
The first line of the German Constitution reads: “Die Würde des Menschen ist unantastbar.”
A human being’s dignity is untouchable.
It is one of the most powerful lines of prose I have ever read and was written into the new German Constitution following WW II and as a result of the horrors that the Nazi regime inflicted on people. Untouchable. Not: untouchable except when you are drowning them. Not untouchable except when you are forcing them to wear women’s underwear on their heads and to make naked human pyramids although they haven’t done a thing to deserve it. Just ‘untouchable.’
Someone really needs to bang that phrase into the heads of Bush, Cheney, Scalia and the rest of the bizarro, uneducated, incompetent, ignorant as a pig’s bottom and generally uncivilized neoconservative pack.
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This story was also covered by the BBC. It just confirms the worst suspicions of the rest of the world over Guantanamo. Especially apalling was Scalia's light take on the issue, as well as his implied notion that someone is obviously guilty before they have been tried, and thus torturing confessions from them is entirely reasonable.
Apparently Scalia thinks the judicial system is merely a rubber-stamp. It's not a far leap to apply this to civilians, since if the police arrested them, they are 'obviously' guilty and beating a 'confession' out of them is only sensible and efficient.
I've been berated for this report because Scalia's defenders say he was only saying it in the context of 'imminent threat.'
First off, I personally believe that torture is unethical.
That's a full stop. There's no 'buts' or 'ifs' about it in my book. Color me stupid and I'll admit openly I'm probably a tad left of the Dalai Lama in my thinking, but it's the way I feel about it. Torture is a no-no and there are no exceptions.
I would also expect any civilized society to think this way and so I reiterate that in my book Scalia is a Scum bag. (That's a full stop too).
Secondly, if I were to give him ANY leeway, which I do not, how does one interpret imminent threat? He asks the question himself. It's a silly attempt at twisting logic in order to fit the crime. If I think there's an imminent threat, I'm allowed to torture. That's actually what it means. That leads us back to the first point.
Scalia is creating an opening in order to allow the Bush administration to get away with something that the United States, these United States, has been adamantly opposed to for generations.
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