"Stalin would have been proud"

[NC_Nurse]

http://www.nationalpost.com/Stalinwould%20have%20been%20proud/3737862/story.html

In the 1930s, that great legal innovator Joseph Stalin introduced the show trial. The accused would stand up in court and willingly, even eagerly, confess to the most fantastical crimes. At the first great show trial, in 1936, Grigori Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev and other former senior Communist party members admitted to being members of a terrorist organization. They said they had plotted to kill Stalin and other Soviet leaders. In the following years, as Stalin's purges picked up steam, show trials featured increasingly incredible stories, usually involving the accused admitting to being agents of Western imperialism.

What made men confess to things that were unlikely, sometimes impossible and usually unsupported by other evidence? Torture. Sleep deprivation, beatings, and threats against their wives and children. To stop the pain, you had to confess to whatever it was that the interrogators wanted to hear. And then you had to get up in court and willingly confess to it all over again.

The trial of Omar Khadr has been called a travesty of justice, a violation of the rule of law, a kangaroo court and lots of other things beside. But what it really was, was a show trial.

On the main charge, "murder in violation of the laws of war" (a crime that doesn't appear to even exist in international law, given that combatants who kill other soldiers in combat are not violating the laws of war), the chief evidence against the then-15-year-old child soldier was his own confession. And that confession, made years ago and long since recanted, was obtained under conditions that any normal human being would describe as torture.
American troops, killing one of them. As already noted, he was 15 years old.


This article from a Canadian source, is well worth reading in it's entirety. I did not know this and it's pretty shocking.

[Drale]

1. That is our future

in a nutshell if the tea baggers ever take over.

[BeFree]

2. They ever pull that shit on me

and I'm gonna finger the most likely teabagger as the one who gave me money and a blow job to do whatever it was I just confessed to.

[soryang]

3. The irony of Stalin's system, utlimately the torturers are tortured

...and executed. After the regime runs out of victims, with some kind of integrity, the torturers who tortured and killed them have to be tortured and killed.

This is why the current administration doesn't want to open the door to prosecution, they are afraid that they will never be able to close it again. Once the torture door is opened, nothing other than slavish political behavior is observed. Naomi Klein once said in so many words that the American people were the intended victims of torture. Once you know that the government can and will do anything, anything at all, and get away with it, the rule of law is over.

Like a child hiding under the covers at night, our leadership is thinking, "maybe it will just go away."

[Odin2005]

4. Rule of law is dead.