Leon Declis said:
Oh dear. This will be fun.
Therumancer said:
Well, I have mixed opinions on the subject. One of my less popular positions is that I'm all for torture and intimidation tactics when it comes to getting information out of known terrorists and criminals.
Known terrorists? Like Shaker? A person whose was merely suspected of being a terrorist before the Americans throw him tino Guantanamo and started torturing him, before later admitting they had no reason or evidence at all that he was a terrorist? It seems the US government agrees with you; it doesn't even need for them to be criminals.
http://www.amnesty.org.uk/guantanamo-bay-human-rights#.UugosPnFLIU
In case the sarcasm didn't come across, torture is always wrong. Always. http://www.amnestyusa.org/our-work/campaigns/security-with-human-rights/quotes-on-guantanamo-and-torture
Honestly I think a month in the stocks in a public green with daily floggings and the scorn of passers by would adjust attitudes that won't be touched by years in a US prison. A method I might add our founding fathers themselves did not find "cruel and unusual".
Well, the Founding Fathers would have also been fine with a violent overthrowing of the current government rather than a democratic one. They also are okay with sexism, slavery, racism, making sure religion didn't fit in with politics, they would be opposed to the MASSIVE standing army that America has and especially never wanted to become something akin to America's gods. They wanted to move America away from propaganda and such. Time, technology, ethics and even the US has moved beyond the Founding Fathers in the past 200+ years.
At the end of the day though when some heinous criminal goes to jail to be punished consider how wrong it is when your sort of hoping other inmates punish the guy for being a child murderer or whatever, or he winds up with a "Bubba" as a cellmate, rather than the system itself rendering what people would find adequate punishment... and when you think back I doubt many people here can claim to be innocent of hoping terrible things happen to certain criminals once they get locked up, after all, I've read certain statements.
And what if it's the wrong person? Which the US justice system does sadly, all too often; http://www.amnestyusa.org/our-work/issues/death-penalty/us-death-penalty-facts/death-penalty-and-innocence
Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm well aware of the arguments by the other side of the equasion, I just disagree with them. When it comes to terrorism and national security for example there are understandably no "human rights" in the traditional sense, nor should there be. In cases like the one you mention it becomes difficult, if not outright impossible, to publically reveal the reasons for someone being held since doing so can out intelligence assets, undercover operatives, and other things. This is also why traditional trials are not possible and we have things like alternative spy courts and the like. After all having a dozen of our people killed just so we can justify why we did what we did to one dude is absolutely ridiculous. Sadly one of the problems is we haven't been able, or willing, to control information properly here, which means that when such prisoners complain to the civilian media they can seemingly make a case for being innocent or "unfairly detained" when all of the evidence against them came from intelligence or counter-intelligence sources the US can't divulge. Basically if this guy's "best friend" in a terrorist organization was actually a CIA plant or informant, that can't be revealed to the public without getting that guy killed, especially if he's still in deep cover and feeding information to the authorities. Ultimatly there is always going to be a degree of trust required with any functional government on this level, especially when it competes with and comes into conflict with other societies. The government is also going to abuse that trust at times, but at the end of the day that is the price you pay for having a mighty civilization in a divided world. For the most part I think the government does the right thing the majority of the time, it's just the cases where it messes up or corruption shows it gets a lot more attention. It should also be noted one of the reasons why I am so militant for a world unity, even at a very high cost in blood, is that a single global super culture will end a lot of these problems, allowing such things to be handled more along the lines of undercover police work, as opposed to having to play a game between sovereign nations and the cultures that inhabit them... but that's another entire discussion.
When it comes to "innocent people" getting executed I pretty much ignore most of that stuff. At the end of the day when it comes to civilian crime, everyone gets their day in court. The system is already heavily weighted in the favor of the defendant for most purposes, and there are all kinds of appeals and such in place when it comes to higher end punishments. Truthfully the failure of our system is how easy it makes it for people to get away with crimes, as opposed to cases where an allegedly innocent person might be made to suffer, and honestly if you ask any criminal most of them will claim to be innocent. What's more years after the fact when the evidence is old, and the witnesses scattered and have their memories a bit fuzzier with time, it's comparatively easier to win a re-trial which is why so many criminals push for them when facing long term sentences or manage to delay something like the death penalty. It raises a lot of questions about how "new evidence" would have actually fared had it been presented to the original prosecution and jury in light of what they had lined up right then and there. As a result I tend not to get heavily involved in cases where someone claims some dude was unfairly executed, that's pretty much going to be the case someone is argueing almost all the time, unless the person was responsible for some truly infamous events.
As far as the founding fathers go, my point here is that you cannot argue intent and what the central principles of our society are when the people who established our society disagreed with them. To invoke something like the protection against "cruel and unusual punishment" needs to be taken in the context of the people who wrote that guideline.
When it comes to a lot of the positions of the founding fathers on a number of subjects your absolutely right, which is half the problem when you start trying to use guidelines left by them well outside of their intended context, and deal with problems that largely occurred because that intended context was breached. Claiming that you have a constitutional protection against torture when the law was never intended that way, is pure idiocy, and no wonder it creates a huge problem within society and numerous legal arguments. Not to mention the increasing problem the USA has with maintaining order when huge numbers of the worst criminals literally have no fear of the system. We basically overflow our prison system to a crazy degree, and then see a lot of those people head right back out and do the same garbage because they have nothing to worry about. As I said, a month in the stocks would probably deter more people than years in prison, especially when it comes to hardened criminals who basically wind up running the places with their hardened criminal buddies because at the end of the day the guards can't even really do much to them.
As far as potentially overthrowing the government, yep, that's what the second amendment is all about when you get down to it. The idea if it goes too far against the will of the people the tools will be there for an effective uprising. The constitution was seen as a sort of experiment as it was, and I don't think it was ever intended to form a societal backbone the way it has for this long a period of time.
As far as the long term intentions of the founding fathers, I think a lot of people underestimate them and their intentions. They realized the US was never going to be a world power within their lifetimes due to the other empires out there acting as the focus of world attention. They did however realize what a huge pile of resources they were sitting on and what it could be built into given enough time. Of course a lot of this goes into "conspiracy" territory and into what records of theirs you believe, how closely you tie them to international freemasonry, and whether you believe Ben Franklin's connections to the so called "Hellfire Clubs" in Europe (the real ones the Marvel Comics organization were based on). For example there have been guys tracing masonic symbols from their day all over the country and pointed out they can be seen to form power grids by many belief systems which would ensure prosperity, dominance, etc... whether you believe in the occult or not, simply acknowledging that they probably did it intentionally is a sort of statement of intent, whether you believe it worked or not. You don't basically set up ultra-long term ritual magic for these kinds
of purposes because your ultimate vision is humble.... and speaking for my part I don't know for sure, but I can kind of see it happening, a lot of these guys seemed arrogant enough. To be honest I kind of expect if The Founding Fathers were around right now we'd probably have been invading Europe for payback given some of their politics (and it was impractical at the time) but that's neither here nor there. They'd love our army, they just took their attitude at the time because they knew they couldn't build one, and if they tried it would have ticked off the empires at the time who were all mostly ignoring the renegade colonies, probably with the intent that whomever won could come and conquer them for their resources afterwards... but instead they kind of wrecked each other and the "Age Of Empires" more or less ended.