This may satisfy harsh punishment enthusiasts' notion of justice but all it does is waste billions of dollars, while destroying prisoners' lives and heaping pain and suffering on their families.
Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, notes that after years of being subjected to treatment designed to destroy prisoners physically and psychologically, "if someone emerges from this kind of system and then supplies a confession or a guilty plea, how confident can we be that the statement is untainted by torture?
When the CIA destroyed those prisoner interrogation videotapes, was it also destroying the truth about 9/11?
Another was partly destroyed by Jewish prisoners, who somehow managed to marshal the strength of the powerless during a 1944 revolt.
"But now the Europeans treat us like animals and our children will grow up in a destroyed country as prisoners, not citizens".
Or to the CIA officials who destroyed videotapes of prisoner interrogations.
Major Rostaing took the British of the garrison prisoner, destroyed what goods he could not take, and burned the wooden fort to the ground.
Edward B. MacMahon Jr., who represented Mr. Moussaoui during his trial in 2006, said in an interview on Friday that based on the C.I.A.'s acknowledgment that tapes of two Qaeda prisoners were destroyed, "It's obvious to me that they destroyed material evidence in the case".
The next months saw many such raids which harassed the enemy, captured prisoners, and destroyed defensive works.
They pass the ruins of Iraq's ancient cities, such as Ur, Nimrud and Bablyon, some of humanity's earliest settled cities, and through the modern ruins of Baghdad and Nasiriyah where police stations have been ransacked and prisons holding political prisoners have been destroyed.
