12 February 2008

Mr Justice Bauer

Oh, goodie — we've got a Supreme Court Justice who's a fan of 24.

Justice Scalia argued that courts could take stronger measures when a witness refused to answer questions.

"I suppose it's the same thing about so-called torture. Is it really so easy to determine that smacking someone in the face to determine where he has hidden the bomb that is about to blow up Los Angeles is prohibited in the constitution?" he asked.

"It would be absurd to say you couldn't do that. And once you acknowledge that, we're into a different game.

That's from the so-called BBC.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

The "would it save thousands of lives if we waterboarded" argument is a curious one. We obviously invaded Iraq under faulty intelligence, with Curveball being cited as if he was two independent sources, for instance. And while Powell did what he could to weed out the crapola before his non-Adlai Stevenson moment before the UN, Tenet was certainly in a position to know the links between Iraq and Al Qaeda were at best tenuous (and even told the Senate there was no smoking gun connection).

So, would it have saved thousands of lives if we waterboarded Tenet and Powell?

Frank "no relation" Lynch

Anonymous said...

Why so-called BBC ?

Jack Lynch said...

I'm just playing with the phrase "so-called torture."