29 April 2009

Supreme Court Luminaries: Reasons why sweeping torture under the rug is unacceptable

I found these on talkleft.com, but they are hardly the words of raving left wingers. I think they say as well as anyone could why it is totally unacceptable to sweep torture and torturers under the rug, and 'move on.'

Justice Robert Jackson, dissent to Korematsu v. U.S.:

The chief restraint upon those who command the physical forces of the country, in the future as in the past, must be their responsibility to the political judgments of their contemporaries and to the moral judgments of history.

Justice Brandeis:

Decency, security and liberty alike demand that government officials shall be subjected to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen. In a government of laws, existence of the government will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously. Our Government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the Government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that, in the administration of the criminal law, the end justifies the means -- to declare that the Government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal -- would bring terrible retribution. Against that pernicious doctrine this Court should resolutely set its face.

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