[Buddha-l] A Buddhist lawyer's concern

[Richard Hayes]

Dear denizens,

Last week a professor of law, who also happens to be the president of the 
local insight meditation outfit, gave an interesting talk at the philosophy 
department. Her talk was too detailed for me to offer a summary that does it 
justice, but her main project was to chronicle how the current American 
president and his cabinet have redefined what is meant by torture. 

Essentially what they have done is to define torture as doing such things as 
stretching people on the rack, boiling them in their own urine and making 
them climb trees whose leaves are razor blades and swords. Torture, in other 
words, is what happens in Buddhist hells. Everything else is simply  
an "alternative interrogation method". Moreover, she says, the Bush 
administration has sought to redefine illegal torture as something harmful 
that is done to an identifiable soldier serving a nation. Nothing that is 
done to any enemy who is not serving a national government counts as torture. 
Moreover, the recent suspension of habeus corpus has made it such that the 
president is the one who makes the final decision as to whether an person or 
group of people are enemies of the United States. In other words, most of the 
principles resulting from the Nuremberg trials are systematically being 
ignored by the US government. (But the US is in good company, she said; the 
Nuremberg principles are also routinely broken by the United Kingdom, France, 
and Israel---that other powerful allies of the US also show no respect for 
international law makes it less likely that the United Nations will ever 
sanction the US.)

Shortly after I heard this sobering talk, I went home and watched a local news 
analysis program. The chair of the New Mexico Republican Party was being 
interviewed. A questioner raised the issue of George W. Bush's suspension of 
habeus corpus and his approval of actions that international courts have 
defined as illegal torture. The Republican laughed and called the questioner 
delusional. That was the sum total of his response. Next question?

So what should I do to help my friend the law professor get over her obviously  
delusional thinking? Recommend doing 108 prostrations a day to a gilded 
statue of Dick Cheney, until she attains wisdom?
 
-- 
Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico