| Sqrl said: 1) Akuma, perhaps I'm wrong but I was under the impression that the eighth amendment, and the constitution in general, doesn't apply to those who are not US citizens. Otherwise they would be vulnerable to prosecution for treason under Article 3 Section 3. 2) I could be wrong but I believe it is Article 3 Section 2 specifically which enumerates the parties to which the power of the judicial branch apply. For good measure, some examples of what they meant by cruel and unusual punishment as listed by the Supreme Court: drawing and quartering, public dissecting, burning alive, or disemboweling. None of those are even remotely comparable to waterboarding. |
1) That's not true. There have been a lot of extensions of constitutional power that apply to illegal immigrants, foreign people in the country, prisoners of war, and whatever else you can imagine, although that is an issue that the courts have to address. They did address it as recently as saying that the Guantonomo detainees were entitled to legal counsel.
Your treason point is valid but the definition of treason is something along the lines of a citizen intentionally or knowingly betraying the U.S. You can't exactly betray someone else's country...being a citizen of the U.S. is a prerequisite for the crime. Treason isn't truly defined in the Constitution in terms of a crime in the procedural sense. There are limits placed on what the government can do procedurally in terms of prosecuting treason and how it can define treason, but that isn't what you would call a Penal Code definition of treason. There is no punishment for treason specified in the Constitution (or any kind of sentencing guidelines), so a prosecutor wouldn't even be able to use it. There are federal statutes that do that.
2) Article 3 Section 2 has very little to do with what the judicial branch actually ends up doing. The Constitution drafters essentially drafted it as vague as they possibly could and the courts just kind of went with it. Judicial case law and Supreme Court decisions interpreting the Constitution are a much better guideline of what kind of authority the courts have rather than the Constitution itself. The Supreme Court has the ability to draft its own rules of procedure since Congress gave them that power (which the Supreme Court then outsources to a larger judicial body).
3) You are excluding a lot of examples, and there have been a lot of rulings on cruel and unusual punishment. Electrocuting people in an electric chair has been interpreted as cruel and unusual by some of the states, as has hanging people. The Supreme Court hasn't stepped in to stop them. If anything the definition is much broader today than it was then, since we react even more sensitively to cruel and unusual punishment than people did hundreds of years ago. Its an evolving standard (like just about everything else in the Constitution), and whether or not waterboarding is torture is a constitutional issue. Not to mention it isn't listed in the Army Field Manual as an approved interrogation method.
We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers…Also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. –Raoul Duke
It is hard to shed anything but crocodile tears over White House speechwriter Patrick Buchanan's tragic analysis of the Nixon debacle. "It's like Sisyphus," he said. "We rolled the rock all the way up the mountain...and it rolled right back down on us...." Neither Sisyphus nor the commander of the Light Brigade nor Pat Buchanan had the time or any real inclination to question what they were doing...a martyr, to the bitter end, to a "flawed" cause and a narrow, atavistic concept of conservative politics that has done more damage to itself and the country in less than six years than its liberal enemies could have done in two or three decades. -Hunter S. Thompson








