Scalia: ‘Torture is not punishment’

Think Progress notes:

Scalia’s parsing of the 8th Amendment blindly ignores reports showing that the abuse at Abu Ghraib was about humiliation and punishment, not information-gathering. In 2004, the Washington Post reported MPs involved in the abuse “said detainees were beaten and sexually humiliated as punishment or for fun.” A recent New Yorker profile of one of the soldiers there confirmed that “mostly what interrogators wanted when they asked for ’special treatment’ was punishment: take away his mattress, keep him awake, take away his clothes.”

There is a spiritual bankruptcy in this parsing of the letter of the law with its spirit.