Let The Inquisition Begin
Generally speaking moral, ethical, and right thinking people consider the rules of the Inquisition to be just about as far from the rule of law as you can get, convicting people based on hearsay, rumour, speculation, and torture, is more than a little suspect. Moral, ethical, and right thinking people consider those to be dark times… after all, what sort of society would imprison or execute a person based on that sort of process?
– apparently the current answer to that question is American society
The Pentagon set rules Thursday for detainee trials that could allow terror suspects to be convicted and perhaps executed using hearsay testimony and coerced statements
The Pentagon thinks the rules are fair for dealing with darked skinned people who speak a different language and worship a different god foreign prisoners detainees, in fact, according to their way of thinking, these new rules will
“afford all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized people.”
Really now? Civilized courts allow hearsay to be admitted as evidence? How far do you think a statement like
“Your honour, Billy told me that his girlfriends, second cousins, uncles, stable boy, heard in the bar, that Johnny shot that fella”
– would get in a “civilized” courtroom?
Civilized courts allow the admission of evidence obtained under torture? How far do you think a statement like
“Your honour, after two weeks of solitary confinement, bread and water, and only 13 sessions of water boarding, the accused freely admitted to killing that fella in cold blood.”
– would get in a “civilized” courtroom?
The fact is that “civilized societies” do not allow this sort of thing, the reasons for that are so obvious that they are not worth debating, and if US does enshrine these practices into law it is just one more indicator that they do not belong in the category of “civilized” nation.
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[...] UPDATE: In fact, much of the criticism is so otherworldly as to be downright silly. One such critic, an intelligent well educated person who just misses the point about warfare is here. He analogizes all hearsay (and ignores the numerous exceptions to the hearsay rule, from reputation, to business records to dying declarations) to Hillbillyism, instead of thinking why such rules might have been made by intelligent well educated persons whose job it is to think about terrorism. perhaps it might be difficult to get Fatima to testify in the United States if Fatimah told a soldier or Marine that X was an insurgent who hid a recoilless rifle under his floorboards in the back bedroom. The discovery of a recoilless rifle alone might not be enough to convict absent such hearsay evidence in a number of situations. Further, how to account for people in a war zone, you know, dying. Their evidence would then be inadmissible unless they were spilling their guts as they knew they were about to die. Perhaps The writer in unaware of the practice of being vague as to sources in case the enemy might, you know, be spying on our operations, something the average drug dealer cannot effectively do? Just some thoughts that leap to mind to counter a critic who thinks a system that has yet to convict a single person is somehow akin to the Inquisition – the bad one – not the Inquisitorial system of Justice that is in place in most of Continental Europe, and which by the way allows hearsay testimony as a matter of routine. (Hat tip, Basil.) [...]