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Originally posted by AnthonyT:
"He who does not punish evil, commands it to be done."

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Originally posted by HKCavalier:
(ETA: Hey, what's going on? This is the second post I've written and lost entirely when I clicked "Post My Response!"

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Originally posted by HKCavalier:
Punishment is merely the perceived legitimacy of violence.

The greatest evil I know is violence committed against an enemy wholly in your power.

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Albie Sachs is not here to lecture us on our human rights shortcomings. The South African resistance lawyer who fought apartheid, who lost an arm when the regime blew up his car, who shook the hand of one of the assassination plotters – and who helped Nelson Mandela build a modern democracy – will not presume to tell Australia how to treat its indigenous population.

Nor will he tell Julia Gillard to allow gay marriage, even though South Africa's Constitutional Court, from which Mr Sachs retired as a judge last year, did that five years ago.

At 75, Mr Sachs can only tell his story and that of South Africa's rapid transformation, as he did last night while delivering the annual Hal Wootten lecture for the University of NSW law faculty, which awarded him an honorary degree.
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In the mid-1990s, a man called Henri arrived at Mr Sachs's chambers. A military man, Henri was going to testify to South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He had taken photos of Mr Sachs and prepared a dossier for the bombers who blew up his car in 1988 in Mozambique, where the lawyer had spent years in exile after two long stints in solitary confinement in South Africa. Mr Sachs survived the bombing but lost his right arm and the sight in one eye.

He told Henri he could not shake his hand. He urged him to go and tell the truth, to "do something for South Africa and then perhaps we can meet again". Nine months later, at a party in Johannesburg, a voice called out: "Hello, Albie." It was Henri, who had indeed told the truth. Mr Sachs extended his left hand. Henri went home "and cried for two weeks", Mr Sachs writes in his latest book, The Strange Alchemy of Life and Law, which the former Labor minister Bob Debus will launch in Sydney tonight.

Mr Sachs did not oppose Henri's application for amnesty from prosecution. It is not that he forgave him.

"The word forgiveness doesn't capture it," Mr Sachs told the Herald. "As if he could say, 'Sorry, I blew off your arm.' He couldn't say that. And this idea that I can say, 'I forgive thee, I forgive thee,' it's not part of my philosophy. For me, something far more affirmative was happening. This instrument of the state, of apartheid, suddenly became this guy, Henri. Our country is made up of Henris and Albies."

When recovering in hospital, Mr Sachs recalls, a note arrived promising revenge against the bombers. "And I'm thinking, what are they going to do? Cut off their arms? Blind them? What kind of country will that be? They blew us up. They locked us up. They tortured us with sleep-deprivation. Now it's our turn."

Mr Sachs instead got "soft vengeance". It came in the form of democracy; one person, one vote, no matter their colour. It is a theme he discusses in an earlier book, the award-winning Soft Vengeance of a Freedom Fighter.

Despite "huge" inequalities remaining in South Africa, he is confident about its future because of three strong foundations: a strong constitution rooted in its own history and culture; an open society that speaks its mind, and a robust and growing economy.

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Originally posted by AnthonyT:
This raises a question in my mind... when does forgiveness become enabling behavior? When should we feel compelled to punish, and when is it acceptable or beneficial to forgive?

--Anthony

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So I ask the following question, not to get any answers from you, but perhaps to evoke the question within you.

Am I a moral failure in that I did not kill him?

When I interviewed that boy, I knew what he was capable of doing. I had no expectation that treatment would help him, but that was the best suggestion I could come up with. I knew he would, sooner or later, do something horrible to some poor child.

Is it my responsibility merely to do the best I can, offer therapy to those I can, teach as many people as I can how to protect themselves from violence, saving myself to raise my sons, saving myself, therefore, to fight on other days, thereby saving myself from the consequences of a knowledge that I knew was accurate?

I could have saved that child he raped an unimaginable world of pain, and probably other children, as well, when he finally gets out of prison. Were you to hear that I had killed him, solely based on my intuition and assessment, what would be your reaction?

My own answer to this question, of course, is the choice I made, but I will be haunted until my death at the thought of that child, her flesh ground into a sidewalk, the sun beating down upon her pain, indifferent as the flat, shark eyes of her rapist. What, then, is the sword that gives life?

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Mr. Clarridge, 78, who was indicted on charges of lying to Congress in the Iran-contra scandal and later pardoned, is described by those who have worked with him as driven by the conviction that Washington is bloated with bureaucrats and lawyers who impede American troops in fighting adversaries and that leaders are overly reliant on mercurial allies.

His dispatches — an amalgam of fact, rumor, analysis and uncorroborated reports — have been sent to military officials who, until last spring at least, found some credible enough to be used in planning strikes against militants in Afghanistan. They are also fed to conservative commentators, including Oliver L. North, a compatriot from the Iran-contra days and now a Fox News analyst, and Brad Thor, an author of military thrillers and a frequent guest of Glenn Beck.

For all of the can-you-top-this qualities to Mr. Clarridge’s operation, it is a startling demonstration of how private citizens can exploit the chaos of combat zones and rivalries inside the American government to carry out their own agenda.

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I have long feared that my sins would return to visit me, and the cost is more than I can bear.

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