Objectify This

As if we needed reasons to fear and loathe Antonin Scalia, we’ve just received another. (WARNING: THE FOLLOWING POST IS DISTURBING.)

No, it’s not that hunting trip he took with Cheney – wikipedia offers that “Scalia refused, however, to recuse himself in the case of Cheney v. United States District Court for the District of Columbia, a case dealing with the right of the Vice-President to keep secret the membership of an advisory task force on energy policy. Scalia was asked to recuse because he had previously gone on a hunting trip with various persons including Cheney; Scalia refused, and took the relatively uncommon step of defending his refusal to recuse himself from the case with a public memorandum, focusing on the distinction between official capacity and personal capacity suits, and concluding that because Vice President Cheney was sued in his official capacity, any personal relationship that existed between the two men was irrelevant to Scalia’s ability to render an impartial judgment. “I do not believe my impartiality can reasonably be questioned,” concluded Scalia. Scalia, concurring with the majority, supported Cheney’s position in the case. ”

No it’s about torture. I am absolutely disgusted. The use of torture in Abu Ghraib is a crime against humanity.

Torture, of course, has already been used in Abu Ghraib — a decision that Scalia would have supported, based on his previous rulings. In ” Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. While the case was pending before the court, Scalia answered a question during a Q&A session at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, where he rejected in principle that detainees at Guantanamo Bay have the right to be tried in civil courts. Having noted that the Constitution applies to Americans the world over and to all persons in the United States, Scalia explicitly rejected the notion that the Constitution protects non-Americans outside of the United States, and added:

” ‘War is war, and it has never been the case that when you captured a combatant you have to give them a jury trial in your civil courts. Give me a break. If he was captured by my [America's] army on a battlefield, that is where he belongs.’ ”

The crucial difference is that many in Guantanamo were not captured on a “battlefield.” Some of them are American citizens who were abruptly kidnapped. Originally, the U.S. Government refused to confirm the identities of detainees, leaving relatives in desperation. Some of them were foreign terrorist suspects. We are not allowed to know anything about them; they are not allowed justice; does this sound like Fascism? Or the Lives of Others? Or Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay? Unfortunately, there’s no battleshits scene, and it’s not at all funny. There have been hundreds of suicide attempts at Guantanamo. So, the follow-up is a description of this article from an AP reporter, via Yahoo News and over at PunkAssBlog:

“Okay, so this fellow Scalia has actually managed the unthinkable, which is to change my mind on the ethics of torture. Previously, as you may recall, I had the sane belief that torture was always unethical, under any circumstances. But this good judge has convinced me that torture is ethical in precisely one situation.

“Say you have a batshit insane lawmaker who has never missed a meal, let alone suffered actual deprivation or, say, stress positions or waterboarding. Say he’s trying to remove legal barriers to torture, since there are only legal barriers remaining, and not very many of those. Say he claims torture no big deal. I think it might possibly be okay to give him a little of what he wants to inflict upon random Middle Easterners—if only because this is such an urgent threat that can apparently be stopped by no other means.

“The funniest/saddest quote in that article is this one, though:

“We don’t pretend to be Western mullahs who decide what is right and wrong for the whole world,” he said in the broadcast.

“The guy is just insane. If we can’t waterboard him, he should at least be locked up for everyone’s protection.

“Ultimately, it’s too late. The U.S. has already granted itself the right to abduct prisoners of war and citizens of other countries, imprison them indefinitely without legal recourse, torture them until they make false confessions, and now, it can execute them too. David Sheldon, an attorney and former member of the Navy’s legal corps, said an execution chamber at Guantanamo would be largely beyond the reach of U.S. courts.

“I think this is the point at which I can no longer be accused of exaggeration or Godwin’s Law violations when I make the claim that the U.S. is running concentration camps. Were I an American, I’d be hard-pressed to cast a ballot for any of the candidates right now, since none of them are talking about this no-longer-slow-at-all slide into fascism, let alone planning to put a stop to it.”

And why are there plastic bobblehead dolls of Scalia and Coulter? Could we maybe put the profits towards asking them to stop trying to convince us that “”It seems to me you have to say, as unlikely as that is, it would be absurd to say you couldn’t, I don’t know, stick something under the fingernail, smack him in the face. It would be absurd to say you couldn’t do that,” Scalia said in an interview aired Tuesday.

Right, if I thought this was a manicure gone awry, I might back off a bit, but we’re talking torture to the point of execution. Something must be done.