Stanley 'Tookie' Williams

[Tristan Lall]

Originally Posted by MikeDubreuil

Your second paragraph reads like anti-Bush propaganda. I haven't seen any credible evidence by an impartial party on the subject of torture at these camps. Are the prisoners going to say they were tortured? Of course, that will play right into the hearts of insurgents in Iraq and terrorists abroad. Of course the US government will say the torture doesn't occur. The only thing inarguable and irrefutable is that no one other than the people there know the truth about what it's like in those prisons.

If it were a matter of the goverment saying outright, that torture didn't occur, and would never be permitted to occur, things would be simpler. However, for various reasons, there have been attempts by numerous officials to downplay, redefine and justify all sorts of actions that might reasonably be associated with torture. These range from intelligence personnel defending violent or psychologically damaging interrogation techniques in the name of the so-called "War on Terror", to the sadistic actions of American soldiers in the Abu Ghraib incidents. The rhetoric about "using any means necessary" continues to be spouted; it's not Bill's fault that Bush and others (not just in the administration) use these catchphrases to justify their actions.

Originally Posted by MikeDubreuil

Regardless of what research has been done to prove or disprove the effectiveness of capital punishment I like to leave it to common sense. If you knew that if you killed someone, and were caught and convicted, you yourself could be put to death; would you do it? I don't think so.

While that may be sufficient to convince most of us not to kill anyone (assuming that we were ambivalent in the first place), we should be aware that not everyone operates on this level. There are all sorts of reasons that cause people to ignore this seemingly basic principle: apathy, sociopathy, indoctrination in the name of a "higher cause", etc.. Perhaps most prevalent, however, is the temptation to play the odds; there's always a chance that you won't get caught. And if people are innumerate enough to play the lottery, can you imagine what they'd do with 1 in 20 odds* of getting away with capital murder?

*Deliberately false statistic. But I'll vouch for it, give or take an order of magnitude....