Rendition Unto Caesar by Paul Craig Roberts: "People will say anything under torture, which is why the practice and the "evidence" it provides were ruled inadmissible centuries ago. The great English jurist, William Blackstone, declared that torture determined guilt by the hardness of a man’s constitution and the sensibility of his nerves. Blackstone proudly declared that there was no place for the rack among the laws of England.
Everyone knows that confessions obtained under torture are worthless. By having them tortured, Stalin was able to get the heroes of the Bolshevik Revolution to declare that they were guilty of striving to overthrow the communist revolution!
Why then do we have the disgusting spectacle of the president and vice president of the US and their neoconservative apologists, such as Charles Krauthammer, defending torture?
In his defense of torture as a "moral duty," Krauthammer assumes that the person being tortured is guilty and will reveal the truth under torture. There is no basis whatsoever for Krauthammer’s assumptions.
The reason that the Bush administration and the neocons defend torture is that, having launched an illegal invasion and created an American police state, they are desperate for "evidence" of the terrorist threat in order to justify their illegal and unconstitutional policies.
The only way to obtain this "evidence" is to torture people until they confess to the plots that are invented for them. A steady stream of confessed "terrorists" serves to justify the police state that has been created. Bush revealed the ploy when he asserted on December 10 that terrorist violence will be the result if Congress does not renew the Orwellian-named "Patriot Act" by December 31: "In the war on terror, we cannot afford to be without that vital law for a single moment."
What Bush declares to be a "vital law" is, in fact, the greatest assault on civil liberties in the history of our country."
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