A state of wickedness: governments and the law

There is a great deal of good in the world but also a great deal of wickedness. News tends to concentrate on the wickedness but despite millions of words and hours being devoted to wickedness we humans never seem to understand the evil of being wicked and wickedness continues to happen. State wickedness is particularly heinous. The only reason for submitting to the laws of the state is that the state is created to protect its subjects; that is why we subject ourselves to the rule of law. So when the state embarks upon some wicked enterprise we are more shocked than we are when we learn that an individual has committed some awful crime.

The punishment of the innocent

Has the government punished you recently for something that you did not do? It would be odd if you have never been punished either as an individual or as part of some collective social engineering project because punishment for things that are not crimes seems to be an instrument of policy of many governments.

Obama’s broken Guantanamo promise

President Obama promised that the prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba would be closed within a year of his assuming office. A year has come and gone and the prison is still open. There are about two hundred people held in that prison, and all of them have been held without trial, guilty of no offence, we are taught to assume under a presumption of innocence built into the laws of every country that has adopted the common law of England as its foundation.