Current Events — HabitableZone

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the star chamber
Greg — (archived)

I often think back to that old movie "The Star Chamber" as an analogy. Michael DOuglas is contacted by a group of police who execute people they believe are guilty, and then one of them turns out to have been innocent. Bush seemed to set up a similar star chamber where as long as they thought Saddam had WMD it was enough. In effect they were the same as the magistrates in the star chamber.
Just like in the movie though, sooner or later the star chamber approach turns out to be wrong because it is based on guessing. The anti war protesters are in Michael Douglas's position, that the star chamber approach is wrong because it kills innocent people. I know Tom claims less were killed than Saddam would have anyway, but this is the star chamber approach. Killing some people now to avoid them possibly killing others later.
It would be hard to work out if the Iraqis are better off so far. Again this is the problem of the star chamber, the idea was supposedly to help them but arguably such benefits if they ever occur will be in the distant future. We have to calculate how many Saddam would have killed, how bad life under him was versus how many the US killed and how bad it is under them now. Then we have to extrapolate that to an unknown future and say whether the star chamber approach worked. We also don't know if another puppet dictator like Saddam was will take his place and be worse.
The whole of the western justice system has always rejected the star chamber approach. Some police do this but if they are caught they are arrested themselves. Rumsfled's OSP basically was a star chamber.

Hardin is a hard-working, honest judge becoming frustrated with a legal system, that continuously forces him to release criminals on technicalities. He reaches his breaking point when he must set free two members of a child-pornography ring accused of murdering a boy. Feeling defeated, Hardin turns to his mentor Judge Caulfield, who ushers him into a secret society of magistrates called the Star Chamber. These judges act as deadly vigilantes, exacting revenge on heinous lawbreakers freed on technicalities. But when the Star Chamber sets its sights on the child-porno duo, Hardin finds himself protecting the killers, who may not be guilty after all.

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