Political Linky Dinks: Boyle-ing

[jere7my]

Good news, Torquemada: now we're allowed to use evidence gained through torture! E.g., "Boyle replied that the United States never would adopt a policy that would have barred it from acting on evidence that could have prevented the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks even if the data came from questionable practices like torture by a foreign power." How very reassuring that statement is—everything's fair game, as long as it prevents terrorist attacks! Whew. Close one!

An uppity federal judge questioned the government's right to detain people for years without lawyers or evidence. But "government lawyers, who are asking Green to dismiss the claims of 54 Guantanamo detainees who have challenged their imprisonment, said yesterday that a federal court should not micromanage the president's war on terrorism."

"If a little old lady in Switzerland writes checks to what she thinks is a charitable organization for Afghanistan orphans, but it's really supporting...al Qaeda, is she an enemy combatant?" the judge asked. Boyle said the woman could be, but it would depend on her intentions. "It would be up to the military to decide as to what to believe," he said.

Yup. That's how the justice system works in the US: it's all up to the military to decide.

Comments

[arctangent.livejournal.com]

Well, you're not being fair; the US has historically been by far the most fundamentalist about Fourth-Amendment-type rights, using a strict exclusionary rule that absolutely prohibits illegally obtained evidence from ever being used in court. Other countries, like the UK, have never abandoned the standard common law practice of making *all* evidence admissible in court -- it is evidence, after all -- and disciplining abuses of power by police separately from deciding what evidence goes into a case.

Yes, there is a powerful argument that allowing the use of illegally obtained evidence -- evidence through torture, for example -- and punishing cops after the fact encourages cops to illegally obtain evidence when the stakes are high (stopping a high-profile serial killer, etc.) I would question whether that's necessarily a bad thing, though; it certainly would seem less infuriating to me than the phenomenon of sloppy cops who don't correctly follow procedure getting huge swathes of evidence thrown out and ending up letting obviously guilty criminals walk away.

In this case I'd argue the line is pushed even farther in the direction of compromise, since we're not talking about bringing someone to justice for past crimes but preventing future crimes (and the deaths of lots of people).

Yes, there's a really really big scary threat that we could adopt some sort of system of paying foreign countries to do our dirty torture work for us. On the other hand, it's also not a good idea to sign a law that says if Spain comes to you with a stack of documents saying "Here's proof there will be a nuclear attack on Chicago, but we had to break the Geneva Convention to get it" -- you will refuse to even read the report in order to keep your hands clean.

[jere7my.livejournal.com]

Yes, there's a really really big scary threat that we could adopt some sort of system of paying foreign countries to do our dirty torture work for us.

I don't think it even needs to be systematic—we already pay foreign nationals for information. If they know that they can get hard money in exchange for information, regardless of the method they use, we are encouraging them to use the most brutally efficient methods they can—i.e., the system is already in place. We also weaken our moral standing still further; wasn't one of our "justifications" for invading Iraq the fact that Saddam tortured his own people? Now we're explicitly condoning torture (when we're not committing it).

And of course, the primary reason we used to ignore evidence obtained via torture is because it's incredibly unreliable. Nevertheless, we're using this unreliable, coerced information to justify the continued imprisonment of prisoners at Gitmo.

Tom Ridge, on exiting his office, could not point to one single specific terrorist plot that the Department of Homeland Security had foiled. Not one. The use of terrorism as an infinite boogeyman to justify torture is not only morally abhorrent, it's not even particularly credible.

On the other hand, it's also not a good idea to sign a law that says if Spain comes to you with a stack of documents saying "Here's proof there will be a nuclear attack on Chicago, but we had to break the Geneva Convention to get it" -- you will refuse to even read the report in order to keep your hands clean.

There are allowances for exceptional cases like that—Bush could declare martial law, or just break the law. By adopting a general policy of accepting information obtained by any and all means, whether or not there is a real, credible threat attached to it, we are abandoning our values.

The law is already in place, by the way; the Bush lawyers are arguing to overturn it.