Close Gitmo but Make Room for Justice Antonin Scalia

USSC Justice Antonin Scalia

Quick Update on the following post (I just found this source after I made the post).... from here – highlights from 60 Minutes interview:

LESLEY STAHL: “If someone’s in custody, as in Abu Ghraib, and they are brutalized, by a law enforcement person — if you listen to the expression “cruel and unusual punishment,” doesn’t that apply?”

JUSTICE SCALIA: “No. To the contrary. You think — Has anybody ever referred to torture as punishment? I don’t think so.”  

Justice Scalia’s parsing of the 8th Amendment blindly ignores reports showing that the abuse at Abu Ghraib was about humiliation and punishment, not information-gathering. In 2004, the Washington Post reported MPs involved in the abuse “said detainees were beaten and sexually humiliated as punishment or for fun.” 

ORIGINAL POST STARTS HERE:  I have heard some pretty stupid and bizarre and quite frankly outrageous statements by a lot a people weakly trying to justify torture following the release of the Senate's "CIA Torture" report. However, Justice Scalia's remarks in this article just about top them all ... posted here in it's entirety. I have highlighted the parts that I consider totally insane, and I cannot believe Justice Scalia believes that or would even say it:

In an interview with Radio Television Suisse this week following the release of Senate Intelligence Committee’s CIA torture report, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said he doesn’t “think it’s so clear at all” that the U.S. Constitution prohibits torture, especially in the “ticking time bomb” scenarios so often cited by defenders of the “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

Justice Scalia said, in part: “Listen, I think it’s very facile for people to say: Oh, torture is terrible. You posit the situation where a person that you know for sure knows the location of a nuclear bomb that has been planted in Los Angeles and will kill millions of people. You think it’s an easy question? You think it’s clear that you cannot use extreme measures to get that information out of that person? I don’t know what article of the Constitution that would contravene.”

As the Associated Press Mark Sherman recently reported, Justice Scalia has previously invoked the fictional Jack Bauer character from the television series 24 to make a similar point about torture, saying in part:

“Are you going to convict Jack Bauer? Say that criminal law is against him? ‘You have the right to a jury trial? Is any jury going to convict Jack Bauer? I don’t think so. So the question is really whether we believe in these absolutes. And ought we believe in these absolutes.” (Reference: Scalia at an Ottawa legal conference in 2007). 

Ticking Time-Bomb Fallacy – click here for good article – well-documented.

My point: If any ever wanted to impeach anyone then may I suggest starting with this raving lunatic. I am totally convinced that Justice Scalia has lost his marbles as they say – he has to go – his views are not only silly, but in the verge of being insane, and from a Supreme Court Justice no less.

F/N: 24 happens to be my all-time fav TV show ... but Justice Scalia is 100% wrong and his words are strikingly sick and disgusting and certainly not for a Supreme Court Justice to advocate.