Due process is the principle that the government must respect all of a person's legal rights. Due process has also been interpreted as placing limitations on laws and legal proceedings in order to guarantee fundamental fairness, justice, and liberty. It may not be called for in law, but we must treat EVERYONE this way.
If we put anyone in jail in our country just for being accused of something, how would that be? How about we torture those that we accuse and attempt to get them to confess to what we have in fact accused them of doing? Since 9/11 we somehow think that we are entitled to eliminate due process with anyone we choose to arrest, imprison, and then torture.
If the "good guys," (as a rule us), decide to torture the "bad guys," (whomever we define as that), whatever will have becomes of "doing the right thing" at anytime with anyone?
If a terrorist group in Iraq captured some of our soldiers and tortured them to find out whatever they thought that they needed to know would this be OK.
I stumbled across a 1961 WW2 movie entitled "Circle Of Deception."
"A British officer is set up by British Intelligence to be captured by the enemy and reveal erroneous information to the Nazis. His superiors justify the expenditure of one man verses the thousands of lives that will be saved by his mission."
There is a scene where the Germans (the bad guys) are trying to obtain information from the British officer, (the good guy). And what do you suppose they did, they "waterboarded" him. Would President Bush have approved of this? In that the Germans were trying to defend themselves from imminent invasion, and a great threat to their country, were the Germans violating the rules concerning the treatment of prisoners?
The Bush administration has faced intense and sustained international criticism for its treatment of prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan, at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, and who knows where else.
At one time the White House announced that all US military detainees would be treated in line with the minimum standards of the Geneva Conventions. The US Supreme Court has ruled that the conventions applied to detainees.
Simpleton that I am, I also wonder what has become of the expression "suspected terrorists," as well as all of the other niceties connected with the government capturing people and torturing them without demonstrating that these people are guilty of ANYTHING. They are just ACCUSED of something.
I am a "known liberal Democrat" with connections to a variety of very suspicious women I have dated. No one knows what they are suspected of, including me, but they must be guilty of something. If the feds "take me in" and suspect that I am hiding things about these women that they want to know, can they turn me over to the CIA, send me to another country, and torture me in an attempt to find out whatever? Would it be any different if I were not an American citizen?"
How can we codify methods of torture? TORTURE IS NOT OK, even if the person you are torturing might have information about ANYTHING we night think we need to know.
If it is deemed OK to torture people we accuse of being terrorists, will it be OK to torture our neighbors or you for reasons our government will make up or decide on their own? If they do bad stuff to other people, what would make you think that they will not do that same bad stuff to us?
We must protect the rights of the people that the government wants to torture.