America Crosses The Line

Oh, America! Look what you have become! The Bush administration now openly backs the use in court of evidence gained through TORTURE!

About 70 years ago, the United States Supreme Court ruled evidence gained through torture was inadmissible.

Deputy associate Attorney-General, Brian Boyle, has told the District Court in Washington DC, that the Guantanamo review panels are allowing such evidence.

Michael Ratner, a human right lawyer with the Centre for Constitutional Rights, says he was shocked with the Bush administration's admission.

"Never in my 30 years of being a human rights lawyer would I ever expected to be in the state that we've arrived at," he said.

It is time for YOU to do something about this - YOU who is reading this! Call your friends, organise protests, call your political representatives, write letters to them, or to your local newspapers, make a noise! Be heard! Do not tolerate this!!!

Associated Press has more details on the legal to-and-fro'ing that accompanied this shameful admission:

Leon asked whether a detention based solely on evidence gathered by torture would be illegal, because "torture is illegal. We all know that."

Boyle replied that if the military's combatant status review tribunals "determine that evidence of questionable provenance were reliable, nothing in the due process clause (of the Constitution) prohibits them from relying on it." [not true]

Leon asked whether there were any restrictions on using torture-induced evidence.

Boyle replied that the United States never would adopt a policy that would have barred it from acting on evidence that could have prevented the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks even if the data came from questionable practices like torture by a foreign power.

Several arguments underlie the U.S. court ban on products of torture.

"About 70 years ago, the Supreme Court stopped the use of evidence produced by third-degree tactics largely on the theory that it was totally unreliable," Harvard Law Professor Philip B. Heymann, a former deputy U.S. attorney general, said in an interview. Subsequent high court rulings were based on revulsion at "the unfairness and brutality of it and later on the idea that confessions ought to be free and uncompelled."

Leon asked whether U.S. courts could review detentions based on evidence from torture conducted by U.S. personnel.

Boyle said torture was against U.S. policy and any allegations of it would be "forwarded through command channels for military discipline." He added, "I don't think anything remotely like torture has occurred at Guantanamo..." [also not true: the Red Cross and the entire world says otherwise]

Elsewhere, Presidente El Busho called for a new world order, including more pre-emptive strikes to enforce his perverse ideal of "Democracy", torture and all.

When they come knocking on YOUR door in the middle of the night, hustle you aboard Rumsfeld's private torture jet and send you to Gitmo or a country like Egypt, where US torture is being outsourced, know that you will have to be able to keep your mouth closed - whatever they do to you.

Are YOU prepared to have your freedoms stolen away from you so easily?

DO SOMETHING NOW!!!