So, this will be too short for a diary, but it's something we can hold on to whenever we are confronted with the sort of shit that Scalia was spouting the other day, and that Republicans have used as a cudgel to scare people into allowing the administration to usurp powers not granted to it in the Constitution, and in many cases, to act in direct contradiction to the Constitution.
It's about the idea that torture is "justified" in cases in which you've got a ticking bomb, and are lucky enough to have the one person in custody who can stop the bomb from going off.
Follow me around the bend for a little more of this...
So, the scenario, nevermind how bizarre (as the BBC interviewer noted) or unlikely, is that we have, through the graces of a mighty and Republican god, captured the one person in a position to tell us where and how to disarm a weapon that's going to kill jillions of Merikuns.
Scalia's (and others') argument is that there is some sort of scale or balance, and on the one hand you have the rights and welfare of the mastermind, and on the other, the rights and welfare (and perhaps lives) of the brazillion people. At some point, in Scalia's fevered imagination, there is point at which the scales tip in favor of the to-be-killed and away from the would-be (suspected) killer.
My question is, "How many people on the one side tip the scale?" I mean, in order to do the sort of moral calculus that Scalia is proposing, we'd need to be able to quantify it. How much do innocent lives "weigh," and how much do human rights and any moral status, weigh?
How many people justify torture? Would it be a million? Surely one person's rights don't count when we're looking at a million possible deaths, right? What about a thousand? Surely a thousand would do it! Or maybe, maybe even a hundred! Of course! Or, or, or, gosh, even ten! Or one! Surely even one innocent life counts more than the suffering (and our society's loss of moral righteousness -- if we ever had that) of just one guy, right?
This is a slippery slope. If we adopt Scalia's reasoning, there is no reason we cannot torture kidnappers. Or drug dealers. Or car thieves. Or armed robbers.
No reason at all, if any of them possess any information that might lead to our stopping future crimes of that sort.
This is a fine, fine world that our Democratic Senators, by allowing whack-job appointments to the judiciary, have created for us.