Nice to see we're progressing in our humanity.

[Pacifist Patriot]

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20041203/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/guantanamo_detainees_10

U.S. OKs Evidence Gained Through Torture

By MICHAEL J. SNIFFEN, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - Evidence gained by torture can be used by the U.S. military in deciding whether to imprison a foreigner indefinitely at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as an enemy combatant, the government says.

Statements produced under torture have been inadmissible in U.S. courts for about 70 years. But the U.S. military panels reviewing the detention of 550 foreigners as enemy combatants at the U.S. naval base in Cuba are allowed to use such evidence, Principal Deputy Associate Attorney General Brian Boyle acknowledged at a U.S. District Court hearing Thursday.

Some of the prisoners have filed lawsuits challenging their detention without charges for up to three years so far. At the hearing, Boyle urged District Judge Richard J. Leon to throw their cases out.

<snip>

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."

[Swede]

1. It just keeps getting worse and worse.

Daily we get this insanity.

[IrateCitizen]

2. And the downward slide continues...

The United States, like most great powers in history, is obsessed with presenting the image of it being at the zenith of its power and influence at the precise time that its power is actually on the verge of collapsing.

We're overextended militarily, we're bankrupt economically, and we're readily abandoning the very ideals that stayed us through good times and bad throughout our history. I'd give us 20 years left as a superpower, tops. The over/under is more like a decade.