On torture 6 Sep 2007 “It is incredible what people say under the compulsion of torture, and how many lies they will tell about themselves and about others; in the end whatever the torturers want to be true is true.” Friedrich Spee von Lagenfeld, S.J., 1633 Politics
Politics Are you being watched? 2 Jan 200818 Sep 2017 Since I am divesting myself of the occasional political whine, here’s another. The US-based Electronic Privacy Information Center and the UK-based Privacy International have assessed over 70 countries for their protection of privacy, both online and generally. The worst nations are Russia, China, the United Kingdom and the United States…. Read More
Politics Secular atheist radical Islamists 30 Mar 2011 So, the man responsible for Republican obstructionism, and confirmed adulterer, Newt Gingrich, has declared that “if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by the time [my grandchildren are] my age they will be in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists… Read More
Politics In the news 7 Jan 2008 Let’s see… what’s happening in the world today? Kenya is in turmoil and thousands are displaced and in danger of death by disease, starvation or tribal feuds. Religious moneymaking scam Scientology is accused of threatening those who leave it with sex revelations (I’d believe anything of that cult – they… Read More
We have seen that the use of torture, though illegal by the common law, was justified by virtue of the extraordinary power of the crown which could, in times of emergency, override the common law. We shall see that Coke in the earlier part of his career admitted the existence of this extraordinary power. He therefore saw no objection to the use of torture thus authorized. But we shall see that his views as to the existence of this extraordinary power changed, when the constitutional controversies of the seventeenth century had made it clear that the existence of any extraordinary power in the crown was incompatible with the liberty of the subject. It is not surprising therefore, that, in his later works, he states broadly that all torture is illegal. It always had been illegal by the common law, and the authority under which it had been supposed to be legalized he now denied. When we consider the revolting brutality of the continental criminal procedure, when we remember that this brutality was sometimes practised in England by the authority of the extraordinary power of the crown, we cannot but agree that this single result of the rejection of any authority other than that of the common law is almost the most valuable of the many consequences of that rejection. Torture was not indeed practised so systematically in England as on the continent; but the fact that it was possible to have recourse to it, the fact that the most powerful court in the land sanctioned it, was bound sooner or later to have a demoralising effect upon all those who had prisoners in their power. Once torture has become acclimatized in a legal system it spreads like an infectious disease. It saves the labour of investigation. It hardens and brutalizes those who have become accustomed to use it. Sir William Holdsworth, A History of English Law, vol 5, 3rd ed (1945), pp 194-195