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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsJuan Cole: Why the Founding Fathers Thought Banning Torture Foundational to the US Constitution
http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/27429-why-the-founding-fathers-thought-banning-torture-foundational-to-the-us-constitutionTwo types of torture were common during the lifetimes of the Founding Fathers. In France, the judiciary typically had arrestees tortured to make them confess their crime. This way of proceeding rather tilted the scales in the direction of conviction, but against justice. Pre-trial torture was abolished in France in 1780. But torture was still used after the conviction of the accused to make him identify his accomplices.
Thomas Jefferson excitedly wrote back to John Jay from Paris in 1788:
Jefferson did not approve of torture of either sort.
The torture deployed by the US government in the Bush-Cheney era resembles that used in what the French called the question préalable. They were being asked to reveal accomplices and any further plots possibly being planned by those accomplices. The French crown would have argued before 1788 that for reasons of public security it was desirable to make the convicted criminal reveal his associates in crime, just as Bush-Cheney argued that the al-Qaeda murderers must be tortured into giving up confederates. But Jefferson was unpersuaded by such an argument. In fact, he felt that the king had gone on making it long past the time when rational persons were persuaded by it.
Bush-Cheney, in fact, look much more like pre-Enlightentment absolute monarchs in their theory of government. Louis XIV may not have said I am the state, but his prerogatives were vast, including arbitrary imprisonment and torture. Bush-Cheney, our very own sun kings, connived at creating a class of human beings to whom they could do as they pleased.
woo me with science
(32,139 posts)blkmusclmachine
(16,149 posts)enough
(13,262 posts)countryjake
(8,554 posts)Last line says it all...
"We know what the Founding Fathers believed. They believed in universal rights. And they believed in basic principles of human dignity. Above all, they did not think the government had the prerogative of behaving as it pleased. It doesnt have the prerogative to torture."
Recommended!
Fred Sanders
(23,946 posts)The one that brings the nation healthcare for all, or the one who brings secret torture for some and shame for the nation?
The Obama administration can not prosecute these alleged war criminals...... yet......the mass media and the stubborn remnants of the war criminal administration still in government will not allow it, why do the Obama bashers on the left not get that?
How many calls from politicians or the mass media do you see for prosecution.....that can be changed with relentless reminders of what made America exceptional.....hint...it was not embracing torture.
woo me with science
(32,139 posts)Jappleseed
(93 posts)Are they not supposed to be all about the founding fathers?
raouldukelives
(5,178 posts)While they are trying as best they can to turn us into a corporate theocracy, those old words of his still fill some people with resolve to stand against such efforts. May they never succeed in removing him from our history.