" The point of bringing this up is, this is an age of violence in the world and throughout the entertainment industry, and so it is not surprising to hear Washington politicians rationalize, backtrack, dip into semantics and find euphemisms that work well when it comes to issues of torture.
A very well-known philosopher - the late Elizabeth Anscombe - stood up and was counted when it came to ethics and human rights. In 1956, Anscombe took offense to the suggestion that Oxford University should bestow an honorary degree on President Harry Truman. She along with others "opposed this because of his responsibility for the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki" (O'Grady 2001). Although Anscombe and her colleagues were voted down by others at Oxford, "they forced a vote, instead of the customary automatic rubber-stamping of the proposal."
Anscombe wrote, "For men to choose to kill the innocent as a means to their ends is always murder." It could also be said, for men to torture other men to extract information, and call it "coercion" or "enhanced interrogation," or anything else, is always torture. She also took issue with language that embraced morality but skirted the real moral issues. In the article by O'Grady, Anscombe believed that modern philosophy had misunderstood ethics. She argued that using phrases like "moral duty," "morally right," "morally wrong" and "moral obligation" were "vacuous hangovers from the Judaeo-Christian idea of a law-giving God.
Meanwhile, in the real American world of political drama, if you are supportive of torturing any suspected terrorist but you don't want to appear too bloodthirsty, you say it's just using "coercion" on lawless terrorists in order to protect the U.S. And - as George W. Bush often says - to "...Save American lives." In fact, the operative word used for torture in Washington D.C. lately is "enhanced interrogation," which doesn't sound nearly as bad as "torture." The "dean" of Washington D.C. wire service reporters, Helen Thomas, who is shown great respect by the media and by every president (she gets the first question at all news conferences), writes that Bush drew the line when he stated that "We do not torture."
And yet, Bush threatens...
The dilemma lies herein: neither of the two approaches is entirely wrong. The former, seemingly more humane, also seems impractical considering the fact that the overall dangers that hover the world today in the form of weaponry available and tactics designed are far advanced and devastating than anything else that has been witnessed in history. Its impracticality lies in its overlooking the gravity of an attack and in how torture at
War has shown its ugly side many times throughout the ages. As people have seen through battles, the casualties can be devastating. People lose families, lose their livelihoods, lose their dignity, and lose their homes when they are amidst war. The stories and the personal experiences of non-combatants are often shown to shed light on the brutality and violence that exists in war. Soldiers rape women and kill men. They
There is no question, however, that immigration issues will remain in the forefront of our national policy debates. Deportation Factors and Crimes Involving Moral Turpitude Research indicates that since the late 1980s, Congress had been tightening the substantive provisions of the immigration laws, to make it far less likely that a convicted criminal alien can find a way to be relieved of expulsion. For many years the basic statutory pattern was
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Rights of Enemy Combatants What rights to enemy combatants have when in United States custody? What are the rules of war in that regard according to the Geneva Accords? This paper uses scholarly publications to examine the aforementioned important issues. Clearly the U.S. attempt at the administration of justice with regard to enemy combatants -- an invented term that had no legal standing until the High Court accepted it -- has failed
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