Kostya

Well I shouldn't say that is quite the case in all honesty. Firstly I cannot read minds, and so I can't know precisely what the effect of the death penalty is on those of terrorists. This being said, I can think of cases historically, say Napoleon's draconian repression of Egyptian resistance, where bringing in harsher penalties served not as a deterrent, but were in fact correlated by a massive increase in both open hostility and clandestine support of rebels.
Is this such a case? Well, in all fairness I do not think it is quite the same, but my point is merely that you assume that harsher penalty means deterrence when I do not think that is always the case.
Obviously, this is not an easily resolved dispute, since clearly niether of us is privy to the thoughts and fears of terrorists around the world.
I should hasten to point out however, that terrorist organisations of every bent have not been destroyed, or significantly deterred in my opinion by punishments so much as by engagement. In Tsarist Russia, the consistent hanging of extremist student rebels did not stem the tide of bombings, kidnappings, assassinations and threats, quite the opposite. Each convicted terrorist took to the gallows like a pulpit and sermonised about the need for revolution before passing away into martyrdom and inspiring hordes of imitators.
To me it seems difficult to measure, what if any the effect of executions of Amrosi and co will have on the possibility of further attacks, but if past history is any indication, and I think that it is, it seems doubtful that harsh punishments alone will be effective.

I didn't say that is was about teaching him a lesson. And I already outlined why I think that deterrence alone is not a good guide for devising punishments, and further why I do not think it is a very effective deterrent.

Whoa, let's not get carried away. Did I say 'Guantanamo Bay'? I don't recall ever being that specific. More to the point, you must certainly agree with me that we have prisons in Australia. Since we have prisons in Australia, it seems not unlikely to suggest that there are at least some innocent people imprisoned there. Ought we pull down our prisons? I don't think it is a good idea.

I think, unless of course you think that the penal system in this country does not involve 'mass imprisonment', that is imprisonment of large numbers of people, that you're discussing something completely different.

Let me be perfectly clear: If you believe that the imprisonment of a person who is innocent means that imprisonment is a poor punishment, your argument is not againt merely Guantanamo Bay, but against prisons everywhere.

I'm really not sure why you thought that Guantanamo Bay had anything to do with this. I do not think it is a particularly well thought out facility for a number of reasons.

When I said 'Well thought out facility' I meant a carefully thought out imprisonment whereby Amrosi was prevented from communicating with accomplices, planning or contributing to any kind of future attack or providing information or anything else to his fellow terrorists. This would require supervisation of his visits, and close watch on his activities with fellow inmates. I do not mean Guantanamo Bay.

Please kindly throw your signature in the bin. Obviously if an injustice anywhere is an injustice everywhere, then justice is universal, if it is relative, an injustice is determined by the dubious criteria of local custom and so forth.

Again, as I have already stated I do not for one second accept the concept or validity, either of nation, national sovereignty or of any kind of identifiable 'culture and values' of any given group be it racial, religious, national or otherwise.
The reasons for this are somewhat complicated and metaphysical and so forth, I'd rather not get into them unless I have to.
For the moment let me simply try to address what I think is a manifestly horrible implication of what you're saying here.

Firstly if Singaporean justice is validated by it being 'Singaporean', then so too is any legal provision devised by any government. For instance, Burma's military junta might decide to kill all people with blue eyes, how just. Obviously Hitler's Germany had its own special brand of justice, but it was relative to that country and quite alright for him to engage in wholesale killing. Nothing wrong with the odd honour killing, female circumcision or genocide, because as long as it's legal, it is justice.
I guess it applies across time also. Witch burning was in keeping with the values and customs of the day, a bit of disembowelment of Jews or Muslims in Spain was certainly in vogue during certain times, but since it was part of the law, not a problem.

Luckily, we have a stopgap.
As a student of history I find this incredibly difficult to believe. Needless to say, apparently this particular 'sense of justice' is pretty weak and fails to stop murder occurring across the ages and across the world today.
More to the point, if indeed we do have an 'innate sense of justice' as 'human beings' than justice is not relative, but universally implanted in all homo sapiens.

I honestly am not quite sure what your position is. is it that justice is merely relative? Or that it is a universal 'sense' in all human beings. I personally disagree with both those hypotheses, but I'd rather only have to deal with the one you're putting to me.

Let me just put two statements about justice to you, and see if they jibe:

1. An injustice anywhere, is an injustice everywhere

2. its all relative to where you are and what you do.

What do you mean certainly drink driving won't get you executed. What about if a small island nation decides it is so horrified by drinking, it is such an anathema to the values of those people that it decides to punish drink driving by death?

People have been put to death for not eating pork on this planet for goodness sake.