I'm a bit confused about this whole torture ordeal we're currently going through.
It seems as if the people who were actually doing the torturing, the foot soldiers, so to speak, will not be prosecuted at all. They get set free. Basically, they are not expected to have ever read our Constitution nor the international laws and regulations that we, in good faith, abide by. We will operate on the assumption that they couldn't have known that what they were doing was torture. I think they were also expected to be totally ignorant of history, a history that had our own country going after other countries for using similar or identical torture methods on us. These people apparently did not have the moral compass portion of their brains operational, common sense was short-circuited; they were the blind being led by the self-blindfolded.
We are also told that there are too many problems facing us and we should not focus on prosecuting anyone at all, and just let go of what has gone before. They say that if we pursue Bush and Cheney's Little Shop of Horrors, all we are doing is creating a new "witch hunt," and there is just too much going on right now for us to get bogged down by this.
Let's move forward and let go of the past, they tell us.
The only thing is....I have a feeling that there are quite a few people in our overcrowded prisons that can make that same argument. If we're going to let the aristocracy get away with breaking the laws, then let's also let Charles Manson go. And all of the Nazi war criminals. And the murderers and the rapists. The bank robbers and the wife-beaters. I mean, we're moving forward, aren't we? Leaving the past behind? Isn't it the same logic? That for reason X, we should let criminals get away with crime Y? Criminals who can justify to themselves that what they were doing was right?
And one more thing. The term "which hunt" has taken on a certain feeling of sympathy, of unjust prosecution because of the whole Salem ordeal. A fanatical society went after innocent people who were not actually "witches" (baby killing evil minions of hell, as they put it) at all. They burned the witches and marred our history books with their ashes. It's just that we now know that the "witch hunt" was unjustified; those poor women were not witches.
I don't know if the term "witch hunt" can be applied to the torturers of today. Unlike the women of Salem, these guys actually are the "witches", they did do what they are accused of. They have all admitted to it. They even swear by it.
So, if they didn't know any better, they were just following orders, or they thought they were doing the right thing, then I think overcrowding will not be a problem in our prisons anymore.
This is the party that calls criminals, patriotic American heroes.
p.s. The U.S. considers waterboarding a form of torture. We prosecuted it as a war crime after WW2.
1. Mixed data - some may be true, and some false. The torturee is under stress to tell you something, but not perhaps strongly inclined to tell the truth to his enemies.
2. More resistance to capture in the future. In the past, enemies surrendered to US troops easily because they knew that they would be treated well. Now, they know that they will be tortured.
3. Worse treatment for US troops captured in the future.
4. Recruiting for our enemies.
5. International condemnation.
And they have yet to come up with one undisputed intelligence breakthrough because of torture. The FBI, on the other hand, who actually know how to treat prisoners, got excellent data from some captives.
Well, guess what, just because you justify it to yourself doesn't make it moral (albeit morality was never Bush's strong suit, no matter what he sold America during the election). Bush/Cheney need to go to jail just like the cop killers.
[On a side note, does anyone remember when Paris Hilton did a few hours in jail and got out cause she couldn't take it? The news cycle went crazy with "Do the rich have a different justice system than the poor?" Well, no duh! A nice footnote to that came a month or so later when Scooter Libby got convicted and then let off scot-free for conspiring to put a CIA agent in harm's way.]
By the 1600s, farmers had of course adapted crops to the cooler climate. However, there were a couple of poor growing seasons which included the right conditions for ergot in the rye crops, plus a considerable number of refugees and widows from the Thirty Years War, and still a great deal of religious strife between Protestants and Catholics.
Many of the accused were women who had no families to support them. A number of others were women who had both property and greedy in-laws.
The torturers who forced confessions from the "witches" learned their techniques from the Inquisition. Many witch hunters refused to accept that the accused might be innocent, so they simply kept torturing people till they confessed and then tortured them more to implicate others.