A Quote by Jerrold Nadler
Torture, including practices like waterboarding, violates the legal and moral standards of all civilized nations.
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Words without deeds violates the moral and legal obligation we have under the genocide convention but, more importantly, violates our sense of right and wrong and the standards we have as human beings about looking to care for one another.
I apply the Abraham Lincoln test for moral casuistry: 'If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.' Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.
Waterboarding isn't torture. We do waterboarding to our own soldiers in the military.
If waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.
We used to have adults who set standards, moral standards, cultural standards, legal standards. They were better than we were. They gave us something to aspire to. They were people that we described as having dignity and character. That's all gone now, particularly the upper levels of the Democrat Party. There isn't any of that kind of decency, dignity, character, morality.
It seems fair to say that while the moral standards of the nineteenth century persisted almost unchanged into the twentieth, moral practices changed sharply, and that though the standards of the nineteenth century persisted the institutions that had sustained them and the sanctions that had enforced them lost influence and authority.
Legality alone is no guide for a moral people. There are many things in this world that have been, or are, legal but clearly immoral. Slavery was legal. Did that make it moral? South Africa’s apartheid, Nazi persecution of Jews, and Stalinist and Maoist purges were all legal, but did that make them moral?
I know waterboarding is torture because I have been on the giving and receiving end of the practice.
Elie Wiesel has for years served as the moral compass of the civilized world. For many of us, including me, he has defined the Holocaust.
We believe that big nations should not bully smaller nations, and that the sovereignty of nations must be respected. And we have long urged that disputes be resolved peacefully, including through mechanisms like international arbitration.
It's convenient how everyone who supports waterboarding and torture, or "enhanced interrogation techniques" as they like to call it, have never experienced it themselves. Yet everyone who has, myself included, are firmly against it.
I am firmly convinced that in the world of today all nations will be forced to the conclusion that cooperation for law, justice, and peace is the only alternative to a constant race in armaments-including atomic armaments-and to other disruptive practices that will bring the nations participating in them on either side to a common ruin, the equivalent of universal suicide.
I had in mind going worse than waterboarding. It's enough. We have right now a country that's under siege. It's under siege from a people, from - we're like living in medieval times. If I have it to do and if it's up to me, I would absolutely bring back waterboarding. And if it's going to be tougher than waterboarding, I would bring that back, too.
It's never acceptable to target civilians. It violates the Geneva Accords, it violates the international law of war and it violates all principles of morality.
There is as yet no civilized society, but only a society in the process of becoming civilized. There is as yet no civilized nation, but only nations in the process of becoming civilized. From this standpoint, we can now speak of a collective task of humankind. The task of humanity is to build a genuine civilization.
I don't believe that we should limit waterboarding - or, quite frankly, any other alternative torture technique - if it means saving Americans' lives.
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