A post for Torture Awareness Month
Torture shouldn't happen. People, even vile people, have rights.
These are such fundamental, basis-of-civilisation truisms that I really didn't think I'd have to defend them in my lifetime, but the goalposts are moving fast.
That Santayana chap said something about learning from history, but it seems we forgot it. Faced with terrorism - evil, fanaticism and hatred - we're gleefully lowering ourselves as close to its level as we can stoop. And if torture is acceptable, what isn't? That's not a rhetorical question - I truly want to know where, if at all, pro-torture people would draw the line. What action is, to you, morally impermissible for a government?
To take only a slight tangent, we've seen London's Metropolitan Police make serious mistakes recently. That's a professional police force, highly trained and experienced in anti-terrorism, with the best possible infrastructure and communications, far removed from the "fog of war", but they still acted on erroneous information to arrest - and shoot - innocent people.
People and intelligence are fallible.
Which is why it's ridiculous to assume every Guantanamo detainee is guilty, and inexcusable to dismiss prisoner suicides as a PR stunt.
Do browse around Bloggers Against Torture. And then join in.
These are such fundamental, basis-of-civilisation truisms that I really didn't think I'd have to defend them in my lifetime, but the goalposts are moving fast.
That Santayana chap said something about learning from history, but it seems we forgot it. Faced with terrorism - evil, fanaticism and hatred - we're gleefully lowering ourselves as close to its level as we can stoop. And if torture is acceptable, what isn't? That's not a rhetorical question - I truly want to know where, if at all, pro-torture people would draw the line. What action is, to you, morally impermissible for a government?
To take only a slight tangent, we've seen London's Metropolitan Police make serious mistakes recently. That's a professional police force, highly trained and experienced in anti-terrorism, with the best possible infrastructure and communications, far removed from the "fog of war", but they still acted on erroneous information to arrest - and shoot - innocent people.
People and intelligence are fallible.
Which is why it's ridiculous to assume every Guantanamo detainee is guilty, and inexcusable to dismiss prisoner suicides as a PR stunt.
Do browse around Bloggers Against Torture. And then join in.
Labels: PCIFS
posted by MissPrism at 7:01 pm
3 Comments:
eh, they don't recruit from planet perfect.
I agree about the problem of forgeting who we are when we fight fire with fire in the war on terror.
Is it wrong to think spammers should lose a finger for every guilty offence?
[/troll]
Hey! see i think that's important pointing out that even vile people have rights! thinking otherwise is pretty much giving into mob mentality. and actually - who wants to stoop to the same level as murderers and terrorists? the reason why terrorism is so awful is that those people don't care about which individuals they're affecting - they don't care about individuals. to me -individuals are of paramount importance - not some abstract idea - because we're all individuals and we're real! we have skin that hurts when it gets cut - this seems to elude lots of people till its their own precious skin that gets hurt.
if we can't have an acceptance of universal human rights we may as well just give up and join some militia somewhere.
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