Reading of the deliberate torture and inhuman treatment of human beings at Guantanamo, the conclusion is inescapeable that the Bush administration makes us, American citizens, cowards for not speaking up and for going along in silence.
Not real big Robert H. Jackson fans in the Bush administration. But as citizens we ought to ask what good Germans we would have made in the 1930s-40s.
How cherished as an organizing principle to American policy are the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Fourth Geneva Convention?
And how would we, as citizens, be accountable to a future tribunal on American human rights violations?
It is fitting that Guantanamo, after torturing and driving their prisoners insane, conducts kangaroo courts and politically timed show trials.
Robert H. Jackson on the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg:
“That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason.”— Opening Statement before the International Military Tribunal; November 21, 1945, in the Palace of Justice at Nuremberg, Germany. Justice Robert H. Jackson, Chief of Counsel for the United States, made his opening statement to the International Military Tribunal in Case No. 1, The United States of America, the French Republic, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics v. Hermann Wilhelm Göring, et al.
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