In a recent interview, everyone’s favourite extreme right wing U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia remarked that he found it ‘absurd’ to think that authorities couldn’t torture an individual who had information about an imminent terrorist attack (another take). Picking up on the widespread belief that terrorists will hand themselves in for interrogation minutes before the next major terrorist attack but then refuse to talk, Scalia seemed to endorse torture (or is that ’so-called torture’) in certain circumstances:
I suppose it’s the same thing about so-called torture. Is it really so easy to determine that smacking someone in the face to determine where he has hidden the bomb that is about to blow up Los Angeles is prohibited in the constitution?
Needless to say, he made no remarks about what safeguards or restrictions would be placed on the heroic forces of the government in their quest to protect civil liberties by beating and abusing bad guys, or what remedies a person who is ‘incorrectly’ tortured would have.
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