"Why not Just Kill Them? I Thought I Was Being Sarcastic!

When I wrote this blog entry, I thought I was being sarcastic. I thought, perhaps I can dramatize the importance of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment protections against the government depriving people of their liberty without due process (in an extra judicial program of indefinite detention for people that the government deems "dangerous") by pointing out that the same Amendments also protect people from governmental deprivations of life without due process.

I wasn't really advocating "shooting the bastards." I was trying to advance a reductio argument that took the premise of the indefinite detention proposal and pushed it to its logical (and unthinkable) conclusion.

Unthinkable conclusion? Silly me! It turns out that my "shoot the bastards" proposal is under active consideration by the Obama administration. We, as a nation, are considering allowing people (whom we cannot convict - because we tortured them) to plead guilty to capital crimes so that we can execute them! It is a win win solution. We get rid of the terrorists without obviously violating our constitution, and the people we tortured get to become martyrs.

Are we out of our minds? The only reason we would even consider this is to avoid accountability for our own criminal actions. For years and years we've force fed prisoners at the Guantanamo prison to prevent them from killing themselves as a form of protest over their detention. But we're now considering letting the same people use an extra judicial system of tribunals to kill themselves, so we don't have to face the consequences of our own abusive treatment of them.

For the love of God, what kind of people are we?

And notice what the New York Times called actions that we previously called "torture." "Intense Interrogations." For god's sake, euphemisms that disguise evil are evil.

I am deeply ashamed of us. We've lost our soul as a nation.

Joe H.