I just feel sick when I think of how helpless I am as a citizen while I watch my government's officials get away with shit like this. Yeah, I can sign petitions, vote, contact my congressman, but I always have the feeling of someone that's just watching from the outside.
My hope is that those people that we don't see or hear about that work around injustices like these are doing what they can to keep some sort of balance. I try to convince myself sometimes that these people that love their country and want to do good are trying to use what power they have to make things right. I know for a fact that there are amazing people working in government and I hope the good stuff these people do just doesn't get much attention.
I love my country, I served, I consider myself a patriot, but I worry about my children and their children. I don't expect much, if anything, to come of this and the fact that that feeling is common for me as an American puts knots in my stomach.
I am an American expat living abroad. One thing that bugs me about this is that there is a shrill hyperpartisanship that underlies a lot of this discussion. Yes, we should be prosecuting torturers, their bosses, and those who aided and abetted this via existing CIA programs or via extraordinary rendition during the current and last two administrations.
But Democrats won't sign on to something that will implicate Democratic party Presidents, nor will the GOP sign onto anything that will implicate a Republican president, no matter how despised he is by the Republican base.
The result is a lawless government and a strict reminder that there is no such thing as a "government of laws." In the end, all governments are "governments of men."
As an norte american who was an expat for many years I agree. IT's amazing how different the perspective is when you get out of the US media bubble. Nobody, not CNN, not Fox, not MSNBC, etc, none of them really are critical of the US government. It's all whitewashed in a way that's hard to see when you're inside the bubble.
And that whitewash is not just to defend the national government, but to defend the parties.
I believe this is exactly the reason that the founders didn't want to have a party system. Some of their choices (like the original make up of the senate) I believe were specifically to prevent this.
Further, the entire goal of having strong state governments and a weak federal government was to prevent these kinds of crimes.
For the very reason that the federal government will not prosecute itself, a strong federal government is bad. (Principle agent problem.)
Can you imagine if states were doing extraordinary rendition and torture? Highly unlikely. While at the same time, for a real war, there would be no problem fighting with a bunch of state militias banding together (and it would cost us a lot less... much of our problem is due to the adventurism of our permanent military-- hard to justify keeping it around if you aren't constantly finding wars to start, er, fight.)
> Can you imagine if states were doing extraordinary rendition and torture?
The decline of state versus federal power has been punctuated by events that arose because the states did far worse. There's slavery and the civil war, of course, but more recently state governments were throwing black Americans in jail or executing them with no evidence, turning a blind eye to lynchings and hangings and other atrocities. And every time the states proved that they could not be trusted, the Supreme Court gave the federal government a little more power over them.
Eisenhower sending federal troops (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a0/101...) into Arkansas to forcibly integrate a school would've been decried as a reprehensible infringement of state sovereignty if it wasn't so throughly justified.
Unfortunately the Federal Government was hardly blameless in the racial issues. The single greatest tragedy in the history of race in the US was when the administration of Andrew Johnson rejected Sherman's efforts at land reform in the South. This would have lead to a very segregated South, but former slaves would have had means of production so the segregation could not have been pernicious, as it was (and still is as de facto segregation based on massive economic inequality).
The federal government, effectively, has been a party to the worst of these problems, by advocating for the last 150 years, that black folks "getting a job" will solve the issue. It never has and it never will. Give a man a fish and he'll be back tomorrow, which is why Sherman was more interested in giving them metaphorical fishing boats.
I have now lived in areas where there is a lot more racial separatism than there is in the US. In the absence of massive economic inequality, that poses very little problems. The problems in the US have been racial separatism backed by massive inequality out of the starting gate, something bolstered more than hindered by federal policy (though the states have been bad guys here too). But because we can pick and choose which bad guys we want to condemn, we can imagine that the feds messed up everything or that they saved people from the evil states. In reality there is plenty of blame to go around.
I like the Scandinavian model: most taxes go to the local level and most social programs are run at the local level. Sweden and Denmark, for example, have no national single payer systems (rather municipalities set up single payer systems). However on the spectrum of American politics that makes Scandinavians both far-left and far-far right....
Yeah, the failure of Reconstruction was sad but not really surprising in the greater context of the United States. Huge swaths of the history of the United States pretty much come down to defending slavery, de facto slavery, and maintaining a society which favors whites above others. One of the reasons for the Louisiana Purchase was the fear that France would free slaves in its territories, leading to unrest in the United States; one of the causes of the Texas Revolution was maintaining the rights of the American settlers to own slaves. Avoiding an "imbalance" of slave/non-slave states occupied the country for several decades before the Civil War, and prior to the 'War of State's Rights' numerous laws were passed abridging the rights of Northern States to shelter escaped slaves. After the Civil War, laws were passed in former slave states compelling blacks to enter into contracts with whites which were de facto slavery. Even today, prison labor and racially biased sentencing maintains de facto slavery. It wasn't until 84 years after the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments that Congress passed laws enforcing them. Even Progressive New Deal programs were racially biased; the original New Deal contained exemptions to Social Security (eg, for agricultural workers) to prevent large numbers of African Americans in the South from qualifying; this was a compromise between Roosevelt and Southern politicians, because he needed their support to fight World War II (Northerners were much more war-adverse and non-Interventionist, and more willing to sit out the war in Europe).
Trying to understand the United States and its history without knowing about the economics and social institutions of slavery is like trying to understand chemistry without knowing about atoms.
A few things that are particularly sad about it are:
1. We learned our lesson, given how we rebuilt Taiwan, Japan, and Germany.
2. We haven't learned out lesson given how the same rhetoric is trotted out by both parties today.
I swear... "creating jobs" is the single worst goal in American politics. Any time you hear it watch closely: both parties use it as an excuse to give rich people more money nad chain people to corporate employment....
It's important to remember just how recent slavery was in the US and how much closer to equality we are now than even just 40 years ago.
Some people that fought in the civil war where alive in 1950, and your grandparents where likely to have met someone that fought in that war and or a former US slave.
I am not sure we are closer to equality on a substantive way. We are closer in terms of where you can sit on the bus. But in terms of property and power, we may be even further away. The KKK's terrorism may be largely a thing of the past, but we now have a choice between the welfare servile state of the Democrats and the penile servile state of the Republicans.
We have had 2 descendants of slaves serving on our nation's highest court, a handful of Congressmen, and not much else. In terms of the legacy of slavery, you really can't count Obama.
No matter what the talking heads on the media say, I still think if you put Al Sharpton, Clarence Thomas, Jesse Jackson, and Ben Carson in a room and ask for consensus and ask them for suggestions to fix the race problem, they will come up with better answers faster than if you put Al Gore, Bill Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid in a room.
>But in terms of property and power, we may be even further away.
Given that, at the time, slaves were legally considered property, and not entirely people, I would have to respectfully disagree. You can't get much more powerless than being classified as livestock or furniture.
Wait, you are going from 40 years ago to 150 years ago? Talk about moving goalposts.
Yes, everything follows from the fact that slaves didn;t own productive property and then were forced into a wage labor system where they still didn't. But the narrative of racial progress I don't think follows the nice slope we'd like to think so we can pat ourselves on the back and say how far we've come.
The fact is, prison labor is a new form of slavery in its dimensions and the fact that it is increasingly for corporate profit. We are headed right back to where we were 150 years ago if we aren't careful.
I thought you were answering a comment about slavery with an apparent belief that, in some ways, the situation for American black people today was worse than it was during slavery. I was just disagreeing with the appropriateness of the metaphor, not trying to move any goalposts. I may have misread you.
But it's not that slaves were forced into a 'wage labor system' and didn't own property. Slaves were in many cases property. How can property "own" anything? Can the table in front of me own the things I put on it? Does a cow have any right to dispute being sent to the slaughterhouse? It would have been absurd to even consider in the South at the time.
No matter how exploitative the welfare and even prison systems are, it's still not in the same league. Although I would agree with you that prisons are about as close to slavery as we can probably get. But even then, everyone involved is legally 100% human in all 50 states.
No, I was responding to the idea that things have improved in the last 40 years. I am not sure they have. There are some ways in which they have, but in other ways we have slid further back.
> But it's not that slaves were forced into a 'wage labor system' and didn't own property.
Sorry, I was unclear. I am talking about the end of the Civil War and that the wage labor system was billed as the way forward for former slaves, instead of the land reform that Gen. Sherman and others pushed for.
> No matter how exploitative the welfare and even prison systems are, it's still not in the same league.
Define slavery for me. I think the best definition is when someone is compelled under force of law to labor for the profit of another. In this regard having prisoners work on jobs that generate profit for private companies, and penalizing those who refuse with longer sentences is slavery. There is no other real word for it. Additionally, as long as convicted felons are then exiled from the polity (unable to vote, discriminated against in private employment, etc), then you have something while, not as harsh as American slavery before the civil war, is quite a bit worse, in terms of denying whole demographics political and economic power, than Roman slavery was.
There are 492 billionares in the US and 1 is African American. So, we are a long way from parity. However, there are quite a few African Americans in the 100+Million club and the trend is vary much tward parity.
We in the US deliberately imported
an, call it, identifiable laboring
underclass, and we're still paying the
price 100+ years later.
Now, now that no doubt we have thoroughly
learned our lesson, certainly we'd never
try or even want to do that again, gee,
never, would we. I mean, we learned our
lesson the first time, right? An
identifiable laboring underclass, who
would want that one again, right?
We've been trying for 100+ years to
get this pot to "melt", and we're
still stirring, and stirring, and stirring.
Yes, this observation is not
totally accurate and has several
loose ends, and maybe we can get
by with it this time, and hopefully
with the orientals we got for the railroads and
otherwise since
we have, but, while I believe I see
the intention, I can't be sure
I can see the situation in another
50, oh, heck, 100, years.
However it comes out, and if we are
going to do it, then I hope it does
work out, I have to suspect that
in some places the intentions are not good.
Or the joke goes, "The Republicans
want the immigrants to work [laboring class] and
not vote, and the Democrats want
the immigrants to vote [underclass
needing welfare] but not work
[take jobs from the existing
underclass].", not that I hear a lot of laughing.
Ah, no one would think
this way, right? And anyone who
suggests such, call it, manipulative
intentions can get some pejorative
labels.
There's a cute Disney movie for children
that has a song "Why Can't We Be Friends";
guess that song is a bit too advanced
for much of the US power elite.
I think the states may be rising in power again, given details like the incredible trouble the federal government is having in getting its Apache helicopters back when it wants them.
Federal inaction was driven by the cancer that was the Southern voting bloc. The Senate shelved anti-lynching legislation, even purely symbolic legislation was killed something like 48 times between 1900 and 1963.
The failure to deal with the slavery issue early on put us in this weird place... We're a people of paradox.
As someone outside the US, when I see someone attempting to frame this as a "states rights" issue I see that framing as adding to the problem by making it an even-more-political-issue than it already is.
I sometimes find it useful to try to keep some kind of perspective with this kind of issue. Realistically all governments have issues policing themselves. I don't think this is unique to the US at all, nor does it represent some kind of break down of the US system of government.
Everything regarding everything government does is incredibly political.
But I don't see this as a states' rights issue directly. It is an issue with a large secret federal government (and stronger states or better yet, local governments, would make that less of an issue). But transferring power from the federal government to the states by itself has no impact at all except making the policies both affect fewer people and the government accountable to the fewer that are affected. That may be a win but it isn't by itself much of anything.
After all, it isn't like the FBI are the ones in the cross-hairs of the anti-police protests...
It isn't just defending the parties. It is defending the corporations who effectively control the parties. In short the media is an important part of the power structure of the US.
Why I read The "American Conservative," "Mother Jones," and "The Nation" more than I read The New York Times.
the corporations who effectively control the parties
While I don't entirely disagree, I'd note that the control runs in both directions.
The only reason that corporate interests steer the government is that the government controls the corporations. By creating regulations that favor a company or the industry, they improve corporate returns. Even regulations that damage a company, but damage competitors worse, may enable rent-seeking and be a good long-term investment for a corporation.
So when the people, aghast at the kinds of problems they see, demand that the government must do something, and allow the government to gather more power in order to do so, this makes more power available for capture by the corporate interests, and so in the long run, makes the problem worse.
It's a special kind of hell to live in the city where all this is taking place - where the local news IS what is going on in Congress (good and bad) - and not even be able to write to a voting representative in either house.
San Francisco is similar in a way. Nancy Pelosi keeps winning with massive margins, simply because of her name and the fact that she's part of the political machine here; and no one goes anywhere in SF politics without the backing of the machine. And the machine prevents viable challengers from coming forth. For all practical purposes, we don't _have_ a representative who will represent us; she just represents the rich and the powerful.
And yet, Feinstein was the one who did battle with the CIA to get the torture report published. Establishing that crimes were committed is the first step toward prosecuting the criminals.
I'd be the last to defend corruption, but it's important to point out that these things are relative. A republic can tolerate a little graft and profiteering. It cannot tolerate torture.
She's a lying sack of garbage. Maybe, just maybe she had an attack of conscience about the CIA thing -- my guess is that she realized it would make it out anyway, and decided it would be better to look good on that account than defend something obviously illegal.
> And yet, Feinstein was the one who did battle with the CIA to get the torture report published.
And she's great at doing just that: throwing the liberals a bone once in a rare while, which keeps them happy (no offense meant). She had no choice about releasing the report: she was going to get booted out of the SIC at the end of the year. If she didn't release the report (as was demanded by lots and lots of people), it would have been impossible to do so after January 1.
In any case: if she hadn't released it, Mark Udall would have, since he has nothing to lose.
Unfortunately, it is not possible to solve the problem that way. There are over 600,000 people living in this city - more than the population of Wyoming and Vermont. You wouldn't just tell everyone in Vermont to move to New Hampshire because the federal government can't get its act together. I was born and grew up in this city, as were many people who happen to fall on this side of the DC border.
I agree that it's hard to relocate, that's why I stated "if you can". Some can and some do leave the places where they grew up for reasons of unhappiness with the policies of their gov.
That addresses my complaint, but doesn't solve the problem. There will always be residents of the District of Columbia - it's a city. Just like San Francisco or Chicago. The federal buildings make up a tiny fraction of the land area - the rest is private businesses and people's homes. The people who live in those homes should be allowed to vote.
I don't understand why they don't just change the District of Columbia to consist only of the federal buildings, and give the rest back to Maryland (I don't believe there are still any residences on the Virginia side of the river, but if so, give that land back to Virginia).
Then there can be the constitutionally mandated federal district, that consists simply of the federal buildings, and everywhere that people live (outside of the White House, Number One Observatory Circle, and maybe a few other formal federal residences) would actually be within state jurisdiction.
Does that really matter? Couldn't you just say "Federal Buildings are in the jurisdiction of the District of Columbia, everything else is in the jurisdiction of Maryland"?
If that doesn't work, it doesn't really matter that much if you sweep up a few commercial buildings into DC. Most of those federal buildings are mixed in with retail, hotels, convention centers, offices, and the like, which doesn't cause disenfranchisement if you include them within DC. The big problem is residential areas.
The district would be subservient to the state for taxes, lease contracts etc. but it's entirely possible to treat the individual buildings as "sovereign territory of the District of Columbia" just like how the little townhouse in London is Ecuadorian territory, and thousands of other embassies around the world like it.
Once you walked off the sidewalk, or off the third floor elevators, or through that door, etc, you would be on "federal turf" so to speak. It's not about a geographical circle.
None of these are particularly new questions. There are federal buildings and federal leased space in every major city across the US. The feds have their own Federal Protective Service Police that respond to incidents on federal property in major cities nation wide. Fire/EMS is usually handled by the locals.
The core national mall area is already protected by US Park Police, it would be possible to create a core DC area as a national park and return the rest of all land to the states. Federal buildings on land returned to the states would be treated like any other federal building in a state. There are plenty of federal buildings in NoVa and Maryland already.
It's probably a good idea for DC to not be inside the territory of any state. Maryland would have the power to severely disrupt the federal government otherwise, and it could be seen as a conflict of interest if Maryland asks for a bunch of money to improve their roads or emergency services, since some of it will trickle back down to benefit the federal government.
I fully agree that everyone should be allowed to vote. Solving the specific problem is hard. I just wanted to give a small hint, that if someone is not happy with the status quo, they might try to change it.
Of course I have to add, that first it would make much more sense to try to change the local sentiment first - usually done by enganging in your locale community.
Relocating your family to an alternate tax farm wouldn't accomplish much. The social contract has been severed.
In the USCIA, it's no longer possible to engage with your local community without being cognizant of government spies. After all that happened with the Occupy movement, if the criminals who oversaw these sadistic acts of torture aren't brought to justice, and it instead comes down to grassroots activism, I for one wouldn't count on justice.
And here's to hoping that I can at least continue to speak frankly on the internet. I certainly foresee my use of Tor creating problems for me down the road. It's why I'm such a big fan of Bitcoin, because that's the only viable way I'm aware of to defund these psychopaths.
There was one itty bitty spot in the entire middle band of this continent that people could move to and wouldn't be able to vote. So hundreds of thousands of people did. Still confuses me.
I didn't move here, I was born here. I work here for a private company that has no relationship to the federal government. My home is here.
The apathy about this issue is what confuses me - what harm would it do to allow DC residents to vote? What reason could you have to oppose DC citizens gaining the right to vote? The argument that federal government workers should be forbidden from voting is incredibly hollow - the vast majority of them reside outside the city. Also, this is tantamount to saying "Park Rangers in Idaho shouldn't be allowed to vote," a position I have never heard put forward.
Historically, i think it made some sense. now with instant communication, it seems hard for locals to influence congress unduly.
Personally, I have no problem with adding DC as another state.
Politically, it'll never happen (imho). why would any senator give up 2% of their power to add 2 more senators? There are probably many issues blocking, but on that one at least is a monster to overcome.
There's no need to add it as a separate state, just give back the land that Virginia and Maryland originally donated to create DC in the first place. Then when the next census rolls around, residents would be considered during redistricting.
No new senators would be created, so no yielding 2% power, and Maryland and Virginia might get 1-2 more electoral votes and/or congressional representatives.
I would imagine that the main issue that would need to be resolved is jurisdictional...would laws passed in Maryland and Virginia apply to residents of DC? If so, it's conceivable that those states could influence Federal policy. What would happen if one of those states made it illegal to order a drone strike without the approval from one of their courts...could the President be arrested and charged in that state for violating that law?
The jurisdictional problem isn't as big as it seems, because not 100% of the land will be returning to Maryland, only 99.99% of it. To wit, the White House, the Capitol, and the Supreme Court building will still retain their status quo[0].
> What would happen if one of those states made it illegal to order a drone strike without the approval from one of their courts...could the President be arrested and charged in that state for violating that law?
Probably not, because Supremacy Clause. Federal officers operate in the states fairly regularly, and this general issue (not the specific issue involving the President and drone strikes in particular) has been litigated extensively.
it's not even just the Supremacy clause. Generally speaking, the state governments cannot regulate federal agents, nor can the federal government regulate state agents except for things like the equal protection clause.
See Coleman v. Maryland, holding that since the medical leave act provisions under the Family and Medical Leave Act were passed under the commerce clause, not the EPC, then state governments were not bound to it.
"why would any senator give up 2% of their power to add 2 more senators?"
Presumably for reasons similar to ones that lead previous Congresses to add the previous 37 states to the Union, despite even higher dilution of power.
Manifest destiny? Vast natural resources? Strategic location? I don't see a compelling political reason to do it, but fortunately we're free to disagree.
If DC's Members of Congress are likely to vote with the Democrats (which I think they are) and Congress has just enough Democrats to allow DC to become a state, but a couple of offices are shaky and they are likely to loose power, then bringing in DC as a new state would help keep the Democrats in power.
That sounds like a decent reason. Not compelling, but decent. It only needs to be enough to counter the anti-dilution argument, after all.
Puerto Rico's statehood is more likely though. In the 2012 election both Obama and Romney indicated support for statehood should that be what the people of PR decide. That's complicated because apparently the Republican Party of PR is the statehood party, even though PR is likely to vote for the Democratic Party. (See http://www.caribbeanbusinesspr.com/news/dc-lobbyist-warning-... )
So, D's control the House and Senate, DC and PR become states, and the D's pick up about 10 seats and hold power even longer. That's more compelling than DC alone.
The harm is that DC is already "the capital" from hunger games. Housing prices going up while the rest of the country suffers. People here don't need the vote. Heck, we should take it away from NoVa and Maryland for good measure.
Housing in DC didn't have the crash that the rest of the country experienced, that's true. Of course, neither did Houston's, or San Francisco's, or much of New York City's.
By contrast, people who don't live in DC didn't have their pay cut 10% by mandatory furloughs demanded by a governing body they have no vote in. People who don't live in DC get to pass laws determining how they want to live, without those laws being vetoed by representatives from Oklahoma who find them politically inconvenient in their home state.
I haven't even touched on the fact that DC's population is over 50% black, and has been for decades. It may not be the case now, but in the past the arguments for refusing DC residents the right to vote were very explicitly racial.
If the problem is that too many members of the underclass live in D.C. without representation, then rising house prices is, in a somewhat sadistic sense, a potential solution.
I'm not against letting DC vote to fix the problem at this point. But this situation is ridiculous. There was no reason to start a major city in the no-voting zone.
Can someone explain why they downvoted me? This comment was positive for quite a while...
(Please tell me it wasn't because someone thought I was including dangerlibrary in those hundreds of thousands. That's a distinction that really doesn't matter, and I didn't want to double the size of the post with a disclaimer.)
The biggest problem when your nation tortures people is you've trained people to torture; you've created institutionalized psychopaths. What do you do with them when their mission ends? Are they properly supported back into society or just dropped like most vets? Do the go home to become nightclub bouncers or security guards at your kids school?
>The biggest problem when your nation tortures people is you've trained people to torture
No, I disagree. I think the torturing itself and the moral failings it entails are a bigger problem than the (admittedly substantial) problem of reintegrating the individual torturers back into society.
OK agreed. Perhaps that should have read "the best argument for fence sitters on why we need to clean this up is ..." because a disturbing percentage of Americans seem to believe torture was justified http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/new-po...
Indeed - and from a purely practical standpoint: you've also created hundreds of millions, possibly billions of people who hate your country and perhaps feel that violence against its citizen, who voted for and continue to vote for such leaders, is justified.
One might almost say the creation of psychopaths is the goal of military training. Without training a small fraction of soldiers ('natural psychopaths') will kill for pleasure, another small fraction will be the heroes that kill and put themselves in danger for the good cause, but the majority twill try and come out alive. The goal of military training is to make the army more effective by increasing that second fraction, but increasing the first fraction isn't that bad, either, from a direct military perspective.
Actually, psychopathic behavior is something the military works very hard to screen out. Psychopaths don't make very good soldiers because they're not especially inclined to follow orders or concern themselves with the safety of their fellow soldiers.
Yes and there's the difference between training someone to kill quickly and efficiently for a military objective and training someone to slowly inflict cruel forms of extreme suffering on another human over and extended period of time.
The former you may be able to rehabilitate afterwards. The latter is Hannibal material.
Now I'm not aware of how modern military training is built, but I have to imagine that the top priority for the military is making sure that their own soldiers don't die. Apart from the ethical aspects, training somebody takes a long time, and having people with experience on the field seems valuable.
Much like how lifeguards are taught that the first priority is making sure that they are safe rather than saving the person drowning.
Yes, you want your soldiers to survive because training is expensive, and comrades dying is bad for morale, but it is not _the_ top priority.
If it were the top priority, very, very few attacks would take place. Taking that hill, destroying that gun, or gaining knowledge about enemy positions often gets higher priority than the lives of a few (or lots of. Generals knew lots of soldiers would die on D-Day, for instance) soldiers.
The biggest problem is that people are talking about whether or not its effective and inventing euphemisms. It's torture. It's immoral. It's illegal. It's also not actually very effective but that's just the icing on the cake, the rest is what's important.
I'd consider the _biggest_ problem to be invading Iraq under false pretenses. We've destroyed millions of lives because we tortured people until they told us what Dick Cheney wanted to hear. Yes, we love our children more than Iraqi children but it's not a hypothetical in the latter case.
Another problem is that it can be used by others to justify torturing US soldiers, agents or officials that fall into their hands, if those others see the US as an enemy, and feel the US gov was conspiring or operating against them. That's not a world we want to live in. Torture is wrong, period. We're not the Good Guys because we wave a wand and say so. If we want to act like we have moral authority, and have credibility, and be able to show international leadership in the future again when there may be another major good-vs-evil rallying cause, requiring a coalition, then the US needs to maintain a certain image. But one based on facts, not on lies and contra-factual propaganda.
I'm not a big fan of Obama, but he's gotten an unfair shake on the national security front. The fact is that the broader electorate is indifferent about drone strikes and enhanced interrogation, but would pillory him if a terrorist attack happened "on his watch." If your theory of the world depends on Obama being duplicitous and going against the will of the people to do these things he promised he wouldn't do, I submit that it's not just republicans that may fairly be accused of ignoring reality when it comes to politics.
The issue isn't why won't the government do what we want it to do. The issue is: why do we still want revenge after 14 years, after Iraq and after Afghanistan?
The article is about prosecuting people not just because of the torture was depraved but also because it was illegal. The Senate report finds that the CIA knew its actions were illegal and acted to cover them up. The fact that the majority of the populace approves of an illegal action in polls should not make the perpetrators less worthy of prosecution.
If people broke laws they should be prosecuted. But let's describe the situation honestly: not "why does the government defy the people and not prosecute?" But "why doesn't the government defy the people and prosecute?"
This is kind of an interesting point that I feel has come up a lot in Obama's presidency in particular. Why can the executive choose not to prosecute crimes?
This comes up in another point, which is marijuana legalisation. Under federal law, that stuff is still illegal, yet we've chosen not to prosecute. I'm still not sure of how the legality of the non-prosecution works out
That's a very good question, and in simple terms, one could say "lack of leadership". Isn't the very point of having a representative government to avoid the Tyranny of the Majority? That is, the elected representatives need to do ethical things, rather than just be driven by polling, or special interests.
> Isn't the very point of having a representative government to avoid the Tyranny of the Majority?
No, that's the point of limited government in an otherwise democratic system.
The point of representative democratic government is to institute popular sovereignty while allowing most citizens to do something other than full-time government oversight.
One I don't support your claim that people are in support of torture. Two if they do support it, _they_ also need to see bringing the participants of torture to justice. Popular polls replacing laws? What country is this?
An interpolating poll is simply not acceptable when it comes to this. I am in no way going to accept that 2:1 in support of torture is a true number unless every single person asked that question were shown videos of the actual torture conducted by US military in an IMAX theatre.
Show me anal-rape-feeding on the big screen and ask me if I support it.
Do he have "Planned torture clinics" where analogous said torture to one single gender may occur, where said gender may pay for said torture, then released.
Why is it brain dead? I was merely pointing out that the framing of a question to the public can dramatically influence the results, and I wanted clarification from you about what sort of framing you think is appropriate for different issues.
Abortion may be an ugly practice, but it is a voluntary individual choice that a person chooses for themselves, while it is controversial given that you are indeed killing your unborn baby - I don't think it is comparable to forced torture on other by sponsored governmental agents. Further, abortion is sought out and paid for by one gender of the population.
They are both moral issues, but other than that, they don't have much in common.
However, I will agree that if you made all people watch a video of an abortion, it would likely influence their opinion on it - but we don't cmsend the Cia all over the globe forcing abortions on people. Or kidnap people and send them to forced abortion clinics in Hungary.
People who are against abortion(1) aren't against them because they are forced on the mother but because they are forced on the fetus which they see as deserving of legal protection.
1. To be clear I don't count myself as part of this group.
> 'The fact is that the broader electorate is indifferent about drone strikes and enhanced interrogation, but would pillory him if a terrorist attack happened "on his watch."'
Your position begs the question of whether the drone policy is actually effective at reducing the risk of terror attacks. Many if not most critics of Obama's policy argue that they are in fact counterproductive in their stated mission.
we often believe we can't do anything about all the bad things we see in the world, but it's almost always necessary for people to first decide that things will change before they do.
please join others and continue fighting for the democracy you want to live in and that you want your children to live in. it's going to take all of us.
Agents of the United States government committed these crimes. Other agents of the same manure-free government investigated and published their findings, in graphic detail. Now, we are in the process of getting more agents of the very same un-shit-covered government to act on that report.
I fail to see how ruminant poop would improve the situation. Must be a French thing.
> I fail to see how ruminant poop would improve the situation.
Contrast:
Headline: Blah Blah Government Agents Blah Boring Blah Torture Blah More Big Words Blah Blah
with:
Headline: Protesting Citizens Dump Tons of Manure at White House for Blah Blah Government Agents Blah Boring...
I can tell you from experience that the second one raises global awareness of the issue in a heartbeat and would put a lot more pressure onto slimy government accomplices to clean up their act.
And that's how poop would help the situation. I'm sure you knew that and was just trying to be funny, though.
EDIT: Oh yeah, forgot this great point:
> [The US Government] committed these crimes
> [The US Government] investigated and published their findings
> [The US Government] are in the process of getting more agents [...] to act on that report
This is hilarious. Corporations needs regulation because we don't trust the free market with all its different agents to regulate themselves, but you trust this one monolithic organization called the US Government to police and prosecute itself when the very crimes it committed are evidence enough that it can't? You should do stand-up.
My point was fairly clear, and the phrasing you omitted turned my argument into a straw man.
The US Government is not a monolith. It is a collection of individuals and organizations acting independently and at odds with one another. This is by design.
People who work for the government pass laws to regulate what they can and can't do in the role of government worker.
It is a monolith in the sense that there is no non-government entity helping them in this endeavor. They make the rules, they enforce the rules, they investigate misdeeds and they decide if people are criminals or not. That's why bankers rarely go to jail. I did not make a strawman - read what I said again and wake up.
To be explicit: what is there in the pace of the French acknowledgment of its actions during the Algerian War of Independence that makes you think that France would now be in an uproar about the actions of 2001 and on?
It's sad that this isn't seen as an option anymore, but it should be. There are tons of offices out there that people have a reasonable chance at attaining and can kick start a political career. Not everyone will do a good job and not everyone should do it, but too many people don't even consider it as an option. The result is that the people in office tend to be people who are driven by ambition, lust for power, or desire for fame, precisely the least suitable people for office, with abundantly visible results.
To someone from a nation responsible for a large genocide in the 20th century and at least one world war, Germany, the notion that you could "love your country" has only become non controversial again, recently. For example, flags are really only displayed by the population for major sport events, like the world cup and not for National Day. In fact a major part of political indoctrination in school was that the idea of the nation state is largely a thing of the past, nationalism is "dangerous" and that the future is the European Union. The majority of the political elite can't wait to see a "United States of Europe" emerge and says so openly at various occasions.
This is to illustrate, that the perception of the country you live in largely depends on the indoctrination you received in your youth and the overall agenda. In most countries of Europe strong nationalistic tendencies are inconvenient for long term political goals, so the emphasis is on international cooperation and adherence to international law. In fact German politicians rarely state they "love their country" and would be crucified, if they described their country as "exceptional".
The US instead has been a rogue actor for much of its existence, basically ignores international law, routinely blocks inconvenient UN resolutions, has supported some of the most oppressive regimes in recent history (South Africa, Honduras, Egypt, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia come to mind) has constantly waged war and bullied countries in Middle and South America.
Restricted to foreign politics there is little America justifiably can be proud of in recent history and yet there is this whole quasi religion around the USA as a nation, "manifest destiny" etc., that apparently serves as a mental block even among many educated Americans to coolly and rationally evaluate the appalling record of most of their administrations in the past 50 years and maybe come to the conclusion that you should have persecuted many, who claimed they served your country and "loved it" a long time ago.
Is that Belgium, Russia, Japan or Germany? They all have legitimate claims to that title, having killed 5 million or more in time frames containing the 20th century.
Edited the opening line to no longer claim it was "the largest genocide" and explicitly stated the country. Belgium is still very nationalistic, with big military parades on National Day, a military parade on National Day in Germany would be unthinkable.
A bit of your meaning is unclear, so I want to add something:
If you are part of the half of Americans who voted for either of the two ruling parties, you voted for torture. The only people who haven't are those who don't vote, or who vote for (certain) third parties.
So I should support a third party that will get no representation in the government and have no impact? We live in a two-party system whether you like it or not, and it's not changing anytime soon.
I quickly grow weary of the constant anti-establishment chant on HN to "vote out all the incumbents" (not going to happen) and support an independent candidate (not going to get elected). How about I vote for the one of the two major parties that didn't opt for the useless wars that spurned this and didn't authorize torture in the first place? I know Obama hasn't prosecuted Bush, Cheney, and the other torture enablers (it's political suicide in case you didn't know), but at least he didn't let it happen under his watch.
Either way, your vote is thrown away. Even if you live in a perennial swing state like Ohio, you're vanishingly unlikely to swing the election to the party that beats you with a velvet glove instead of iron knuckles. And if you don't live in one of those states, it's... even more vanishingly unlikely.
The issue with voting isn't that it influences the government one way or another: it doesn't, and pretty much any of us can get more influence by working all those hours we would otherwise think about politics and using that money to purchase connections with actual power brokers (though even that is mostly a waste).
The real issue with it is its influence on your identity. Electoral politics is a twisted parody of real politics, morphing autonomous values and communal choices into something closer to the emotions felt when watching team sports. My guy good, your guy good. Which isn't bad, in itself--it's a form of entertainment like any other. But it's not real politics.
My suggestion would be to skip voting for all federal offices and maybe even state offices, and focus on the local, if you must do electoral politics.
This is a nonsense attitude. If you vote for a party, then you 're acknowledging that you want them in power. If you don't want them, stop voting for them. Sure, your action won't get a 3rd party elected, but neither will your incumbent vote be needed for the incumbent to stay in power. It's just a psychological illusion of "voting for the winner" and not "wasting" it that drives people to oppose their own interests. Within the past 20 years there have been several 3rd parties with some chance, but enough of their supporters decided not to "waste" their vote that none of them ever made it.
For the presidency, under which the power to enact or prosecute torture lies, there's been no chance for a third-party candidate in my lifetime (and I've seen one election, 2000, thrown in the wrong direction because too many people voted for Nader).
In any event, 3rd parties often look so honest and admirable because they've never had to hold power and make tough decisions. If any of them managed to hold power for a significant portion of time, we'd be clamoring to vote them out of office for their misdeeds all the same. Part of politics is about accepting the dirtiness of the game and doing the best with what you have. I'll throw my support behind the party that's good enough for me, and has a chance of actually bringing about some meaningful change.
> So I should support a third party that will get no representation in the government and have no impact?
In a word, yes. If you vote for the lesser of two evils, you've still voted for evil. The government derives its legitimacy through votes. Even if you "throw your vote away" you can at least say that the ruling party did not derive a single quantum of legitimacy through you.
In that case you effectively voted for the greater evil. They probably played you too, by lending support to the third party to split the vote of the good people.
"at least he didn't let it happen under his watch."
People know so little about how the executive branch, including the President, must do the jobs that we, in our comfortable ignorance that maintains our lifestyle, need them to do for National Security.
At least Cheney is honest when he says he would do it again. There are many things that happen when you and your kids are comfortably sleeping or having hot cocoa.
Trust me. There are worse people in the world than the ones prople are blaming today. And it is just a matter of time before a drone takes care of them. And you want it that way.
If someone is uncomfortable with that notion, then maybe they should run for office or serve in some public capacity. But he or she will then discover the harsh reality.
Just watch a few videos of the news in 2001 or 2002 to refresh your memory a little about what we were asking our leaders to take care of.
Of course, "there are bad people in the world, and hard, tough men like ourselves have to take care of them, even if it's unsavory to weak-minded civilians who just don't understand" is what the leaders of ISIS tell themselves to justify beheading reporters, Putin tells himself to justify shooting down civilian airliners, and Cheney tells himself to justify anal rape and murder of innocents as instruments of public policy.
All of them should be imprisoned to protect society from their machinations.
Consider that if you're so willing to compromise your principles on human rights for the benefit of your family then you're basically practicing tribalism. You might as well enslave a race, or subjugate a class, or annex a sovereign nation for the lebenstraum.
Anybody who feels the need to bolster their argument with "trust me" is trying to fuck you over. It's an ironclad rule that people will only say that when they know they shouldn't be trusted.
I upvoted you. But Cheney is still rotten despite being honest. He doesn't deny that many in Gitmo are innocent (or not known to be guilty), yet still declares them terrorists. In that way he worked against your kids.
Voting for a third party sends a message to the two actual parties that they could get your vote if they took <distinguishing position of your third party>. Obviously, an single vote for a third party will not make a difference, but a single vote for a main party won't make a difference anyway. However, if a third party gets even 1% of the votes, then the two main parties would notice that and think about what they can do to win that 1% of the voting population.
Liberal Nader voters in 2000 were partly responsible for Bush getting elected, because they could have prevented it. Absent instant run-off voting or some other way that a third party can be viable, voting for a third party simply wastes an opportunity to vote against the greater evil. It sends no viable message. The 2 main parties will give it no weight whatsoever, as they have total control.
This is the second time you've categorised it as choosing "the lesser evil". I don't think that's what the system was designed to be. It sounds to me like it's so far off the rails that the real lesser evil choice is to refuse to participate in the process and rob it of its credibility.
If I vote for the losing party, I implicitly agree to abide by the choices made by the winning party because I would expect the same from their supporters if the roles were reversed. None of the parties represent my interests, so I don't vote and I certainly don't agree to respect the decisions made by those who don't represent my interests.
To tie it back in with the original point, those who voted against Bush implicitly agreed to abide by his decisions if he won. Only those who refuse to participate in the system can claim zero complicity.
> It sounds to me like it's so far off the rails that the real lesser evil choice is to refuse to participate in the process and rob it of its credibility.
The result of refusing to participate is that you lose even more freedom to pursue happiness. Your captors don't care a whit about credibility.
> None of the parties represent my interests, so I don't vote and I certainly don't agree to respect the decisions made by those who don't represent my interests.
Then you waste an opportunity to help prevent greater evil from happening. You needn't agree with the lesser evil when you vote for them.
> To tie it back in with the original point, those who voted against Bush implicitly agreed to abide by his decisions if he won. Only those who refuse to participate in the system can claim zero complicity.
The good people who didn't vote in 2000 could have prevented a needless war from happening. They had the opportunity, so they are complicit. Only those who voted for the lesser evil can claim zero complicity.
If you abstain from voting, that doesn't remove you from the process or relieve your implicit obligation under your government.
Even if it did, why would you remove yourself from any philosophical obligation to your government, but live within its laws and regulations? You're basically trying to be separate but, by choice, not really separate and not really equal.
I looked only at the first one. It contradicts sources I saw back in the day. Regardless whether I'm right, the point stands that good 3rd party voters can hand the election to the greater evil.
That's odd, because it backs up sources that I recall, and it links to citations from 2000, and not our vague recollections.
As the first link points out, Monica Moorehead, the Worker's World Party candidate, got 1,804 votes. David McReynolds of the Socialist Party collected 622 votes.
The people who visited for Moorehead, or for McReynolds are the ones you should focus your ire upon. Not those who voted for Nader.
The Socialist Party is more to blame for Bush winning the office than Nader.
Oh, and all those non-voters? They were also partially responsible. And all those who refused to steal ballot boxes from heavily Republican district are also to blame! Because preventing evil justifies everything. Including torture.
Then you must think pacifists like the Amish are immoral.
And somehow have a magic ball to say what the future brings, and what the alternative future might have been.
This seemingly reasonable argument (assuming that you do not reject violence as fundamentally immorally ) is how Augustine turned a religion of peace into one with soldiers, as Just War theory.
But it doesn't stop. It also twists a phrase like "imminent threat of violent attack" into "does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons will take place in the immediate future" and "enemy militant" into "all military-age males in a strike zone, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent."
The calculus of violence is very coarse, yet you want to hang us all on its balance scales of greater or lesser violence and harm.
Your political opinions are not universal, and those who disagree with you are not evil, and frankly your way is stupid and the reason the mess perpetuates.
I upvoted your political opinion. Of course mine isn't universal, because not everyone has my rock solid ethics. (And that's party because rather than analyze their own choices in the face of others', they call others' choices stupid.) It is certainly evil to support violence, like torture, when it isn't the best choice to prevent greater violence.
the parties no longer represent us. We are lead to fight over wedge issues while the elites take everything. A vote doesn't matter by itself either.
The only way a vote will have any impact is if you use it to add just a little sting to any political activity you do elsewhere. If your only political action is voting, you might as well stay home.
The only real hope is if a large bipartisan alliance forms. That's more important than if we get Romney or Obama as President (two candidates who are mostly different in terms of party affiliation and skin color, but not in terms of approaches to governance).
So you call people out on hiding behind their votes, and that we should alienate those that cast their votes we disagree with.
...and then you admit you're using a throwaway account here. Ironically, you're hiding behind your throwaway account instead of posting it under your real account/persona. Precisely because you are afraid that people will do what you told them is the best way to fix this problem of government we're discussing, and alienate/shun you for your views..
Then why didn't "your" team fix the laws of the country so that immoral acts like this can't get ignored? You know, when "they" had the office.
Any which way you slice it, buddy, both halves are to blame (and should take accountability and act to fix it). Too bad people fall for your line of thinking and simply excuse any bad stuff by blaming it on the other side. How convenient.
When you vote for the lesser evil in a 2-party oligopoly, you are blameless for anything that party does that you disagree with. You made the best possible choice.
Normally, I'd agree with you. Except it's not a 2-party system, it just looks that way because you have two very dominant parties and the choice is always framed as such. And sure, I've even read some stories/pieces that claim that certain processes are actually biased against third parties, etc.
Truthfully, you have a few alternatives. Voting third-party, e.g. libertarian or something. Or, you could not vote at all.
Voting third party, or not voting, wastes an opportunity to vote against the greater evil. For example, Bush wouldn't have been elected in 2000 had liberal Nader votes voted for Gore instead. If a third party was dominant on voting day, only then would they be a viable choice worth voting for.
Al Gore was a participant in a White House meeting in the early years of the Clinton administration where the idea was floated of extrajudicially kidnapping a suspected terrorist, only to turn him over to a "friendly" Arab dictatorship which would undoubtedly torture him. The White House counsel was explaining to President Clinton all of the reasons that this action would be a violation of international law when Clinton turned to Gore and asked his opinion.
Gore laughed, and said, "Of course it's a violation of international law; that's why it's a covert action. The guy is a terrorist. Go grab his ass." This was persuasive to Clinton, and thus started the practice of extraordinary rendition.
In 2000, Bush was yet to advocate for torture or to be complicit in it. The same could not be said of Gore. Who was truly the lesser of two evils, as far as voters in 2000 could tell?
It's much more clearly the fault of the 622 Socialist voters than the Nader voters. Had they voted for Gore instead of David McReynolds then Gore would be in office, and unlike Nader's voter mix, it's more clear that McReynolds's voters would have been Gore voters, not Bush ones.
Following your logic, Jesse Ventura would never have been governor of Minnesota as people did not know that he was a dominant candidate on voting day but was polling in third place.
Why were the 773,713 Ventura voters wrong to vote as they did? Was it because Humphrey wasn't evil enough?
You make the best choice with the info you have. If the choice isn't clear then you make a judgment call. Good points on McReynolds and Ventura. I presume that Ventura wasn't polling way below the other candidates, like Nader was in 2000. If he was, a voter couldn't be blamed for voting for someone else deemed viable.
If we had vote ranking at the national level, like Minneapolis does, this wouldn't be an issue.
> Following the primary election in September, a poll on October 20 showed Humphrey leading 35% to Coleman (34%) and Ventura (21%)
That's pretty far behind. But I'm not going to research this because you're the one trying to make the point, and you need to defend your position that it's a useful one, not switch topics to alternative voting systems.
If people followed your suggested voting tactic then Humphrey or Coleman would have been governor. They didn't, and ended up with Ventura. Not only was he a plurality winner, but from what I can tell he was a Condorcet winner too.
The voters got who they wanted. Not what the polls said was the lesser of two evils as you would have had them choose.
Let's assume that Ventura was the best choice, ignoring his poll numbers, and Humphrey was way worse than Coleman. The defense for voting for Coleman is, recent polls showed that Ventura wasn't very viable. If Ventura then loses by one vote you can take comfort that you did the best you could. You shouldn't beat yourself up because your vote prevented a rare upset from happening. It was much more likely, given the info you had, that Coleman could beat Humphrey, so that you indirectly support Humphrey by voting for Ventura. (Keep in mind that a well conducted poll will typically have a margin of error of only 3% with high confidence. It's a "black swan event" to be off by as much as in this election. Probably the poll was flawed or voters had assessed info that postdated the poll.)
I don't like making these kinds of calls, though, which is why I support vote ranking or some other way to make third parties more viable.
Yes, of course in retrospect the poll was flawed. It doesn't matter that this is a rare event - your strategy would make it even rarer. And calling this out for being a black swan event is bizarre, as you keep bringing up another black swan event; the 2000 Presidential Election in Florida.
In the 2000 election, "Gore was leading Bush and third parties with 44-42-4 among registered voters" in late October according to one poll.
In Minn. it was Humphrey 35%, Coleman 34%, and Ventura 21%. You posited "Humphrey was way worse than Coleman". That's inverted compared to 2000. Assume that a Ventura supporter considered Coleman way worse than Humphrey.
In that case, what should the Ventura supporter do? I believe you would say to vote for Humphrey. By ignoring that advice, the Ventura supporters ended up with Ventura.
> In that case, what should the Ventura supporter do? I believe you would say to vote for Humphrey.
Yes, vote for Humphrey. If Ventura then loses by one vote, you still made the best choice with the info you had. 9 times out of 10, or whatever high percentage, the 3rd place poller would've lost even with your vote, in which case you did the best by voting for the lesser of the top 2 evils.
Perhaps Ventura won because Ventura supporters felt that Coleman and Humphrey were equally worse, in which case voting for Ventura wasn't risky.
Interesting thought experiment. What if that party you voted for, which was the lesser of two evils, then commits an act that makes them worse than the other party? Do the people that were previously "on the hook" now switch to being blameless, since, they are now technically the voters of the lesser of two evils, and you now suddenly inherit all the responsibility?
No. You made the best possible choice when you made it. That's what makes you blameless. If when you made the choice there was strong reason to believe such shift would happen, then your culpability would be less clear.
Ah ok, so next election though you should definitely vote for the party that was previously unthinkable to vote for, but is now the lesser of two evils and thus the "blameless" choice. So under your system of responsibility, as long as the parties keep one-upping each other in evilness, they can infinitely get worse and no one is ever to blame. Party A is lesser of two evils before the election but then does worse, then party B is lesser but after elected does worse, and so on and so on. Additionally, there is no way to escape this dasterdly plan because as you stated before voting for a third party is off the table because it is the absolute worst option. Yeah, I guess I see how we got to the state we're in with ideas like these.
> So under your system of responsibility, as long as the parties keep one-upping each other in evilness, they can infinitely get worse
Yes, unfortunately. We are effectively slaves, so absent a revolution (or alternative that leads to viable third parties) we don't have a choice about this.
> and no one is ever to blame.
No. Those who voted for the lesser evil are blameless for the actions they didn't support, until the next election when a new choice is made based on the info at that time. The other voters are to blame.
It's very simple: when you make the best possible righteous choice, you are blameless.
> Yes, unfortunately. We are effectively slaves, so absent a revolution (or alternative that leads to viable third parties) we don't have a choice about this.
> It's very simple: when you make the best possible righteous choice, you are blameless.
Ah, but by your own admission, the best possible choice is actually to start a revolution, not to vote for a party that is also evil. So why doesn't your unique take on morality instead assign blamelessness solely to those actively trying to start a revolution, instead of conveniently assigning blamelessness to those that vote for the lesser of two evils but perpetuate a system you admit perpetually ratchets up in evilness? Is it because its easier to tick off something on a piece of paper and tell yourself you're doing your part rather than devoting your life to actually making things better?
Seems to me that if you really want to have this black and white view where only, and I quote, those that make "the best possible righteous choice" can be blameless, then you unfortunately fall into that ... other bucket :/
You can support an end to the 2-party oligopoly and vote for the lesser evil. Doing both does greater good.
I don't support revolution, because it's not the best viable way to improve things, let alone very viable at this point. A much better way is for the good people to ostracize (as much as possible) the bad people. Imagine if Bush's daughters had disavowed love for him, over his needless violence. It may well have had an effect, and if not then at least been a consequence to him, serving as a warning to others.
Nah, you're just being lazy. I could have said the same thing during the colonies: "revolution isn't viable right now, we'd being going up against the most powerful military in history. Its a way better strategy to shun people that support the British, yeah, that'll work!"
At some point back then it would've been clear it was viable. We're obviously not anywhere near that point yet, and there are likely other better ways. We don't yet have full dictatorship, which makes the difference. For example, it would likely take less energy to gain vote ranking (or other way to make third parties viable) by protesting and striking than by revolution. If the protesters and strikers are mowed down by bullets or tanks, then you need revolution.
Party activists are more influential in the primaries. The black-and-white anti-third-party logic applies much less in those elections. The best possible choice is clearly to pick a party and get involved in its internal politics, and not wait until the general election to do anything.
Revolution from within! (Oh, wait, that's what happened with the Republican party starting in the 1980s.)
But that that's not as easy as ticking off a piece of paper and assigning blamelessness.
This is so ridiculous. It allows half the country to feel blameless by believing they're voting for the "lesser evil". You're not blameless for voting for the less-bad of two bad options. You still voting for a bad option.
Additionally, the threat of one of the major parties losing votes to a third party has been shown to influence the politics of the major party, so even if the third-party candidate doesn't win, it still may have a positive effect down the road. People don't seem to think very far down the road, unfortunately.
> You're not blameless for voting for the less-bad of two bad options. You still voting for a bad option.
There's no contradiction. You made the best viable choice. You can't be made "bad" by doing that.
That benefit of voting for a non-viable third party is outweighed by the advantage of voting for a lesser evil that can viably win. If hypothetically you were the voter that could tip the election to Gore in 2000, your best choice is to vote for him, not Nader, even if voting for Nader has some benefit. Voting for Nader could be reasonable only if Gore had no realistic chance of winning your state.
If hypothetically you could have secretly ruined votes for Bush for Palm Beach county - would you have?
Assuming your logic has merit, the benefit for you not committing voter fraud is surely outweighed by the benefit of not letting the Great Evil Bush get power, making voter fraud the best viable choice, no? Why would voter fraud be "bad"? Surely even the worst case of spending a couple of years in jail is worth the future of not having Bush in charge, right?
Are you ready to commit voter fraud for what you think is the greater good? Are you ready to torture for the greater good?
I support torture where it's clear it's the best viable choice to prevent greater violence. That may be an exceptionally rare case.
On your hypothetical I'll say only that I strongly support the The Congressional Oath of Office, namely this part:
> I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same
That said, the best ways to effect change are still legal, like general strikes and boycotts.
That's the same oath all the military torturers took, right? And the same one that Cheney swore (or affirmed)? Who says he would order the torture again?
If you'll torture for that oath then you'll commit voter fraud for that oath, and commit murder and other felonies for that oath. You'll do anything so long as you can justify it with your consequentialist ethics.
Glad to know where you stand.
Or rather don't stand, since your ethics allow you to break that oath to prevent greater violence. And you get to decide which is greater. Which is why the death of thousands in 2001 justify the torture of innocent people now. Our employed and elected torturers got to decide which of those was the greater violence, without making that information public, as it was clear to them that that was the right choice with the information they had.
No, adhering to the oath excludes torture or other violence that isn't the best choice to prevent greater violence. I haven't yet seen a 9/11 related case where the details justified torture. Clearly our "employed and elected torturers" flouted their oaths.
My ethics are rock solid and will never break the oath.
Let me get this straight. Your oath prevents you from taking untaxed intoxicating liquors across state lines, no matter what violence you might be able to prevent by doing so, or the lives you might save (it's a violation of the 21st Amendment to take that moonshine across the state line to use an emergency anesthesia for a backwoods accident where the person needs an amputation), but you believe there may be times where your oath would let you torture someone, in violation of national laws and international treaties?
That's messed up.
And you've just relied on the No True Scotsman fallacy. Obviously anyone who doesn't interpret your oath the same as you do must have flouted it. Or perhaps it's Cheney who says you flouted the oath. How do I tell again who's right?
Oliver North was photogenically insistent that selling arms to Iran, in violation of US law, in order to fund the Contras against the democratically elected Sandinista government, was part of his oath. The enemy had become "liberal politicians, gutless judges and left-handed journalists" says one biography.
I'm pretty sure he believes his ethics are "rock solid" and oath unbroken. How am I to tell if it's broken?
My oath doesn't prevent me from taking untaxed intoxicating liquors across state lines, in whatever hypothetical case in which that would do the greater good, no matter how unlikely. My oath is to my interpretation of the Constitution, its spirit, and not its literal wording. Where my interpretation differs from the wording, the wording should change. For example, if the document allowed slavery, it should be changed to disallow slavery. If the document allows <insert evil here>, it should be changed to disallow <that evil>, or that allowance should be stricken.
> And you've just relied on the No True Scotsman fallacy. Obviously anyone who doesn't interpret your oath the same as you do must have flouted it. Or perhaps it's Cheney who says you flouted the oath. How do I tell again who's right?
Just as obvious as that, except for those lacking empathy, is that some things are wrong. You needn't prove they're wrong, you need only believe they are. Do you have to seek others' say-so to tell whether it's okay to kick a toddler in the face?
Oliver North flouted his oath, because his actions didn't serve the greater good. Simply consult your own conscience to tell whether ones' oath is broken.
This is true if and only if you oppose everything evil the ones you elect try to do.
But there are a lot of folks who have turned in favor of everything Bush did as long as Obama does it. You can't hide behind "I am trying to at least get the loser on the race to the bottom" if you cheer for that party to win that deplorable sport.
Yes, dividing the country further into two halves that hate each other isn't playing into the hands of the people in power at all. Its hilarious that one of the results of this report might be to further bolster the two-party system. You are more sure than ever of your party now, and the most likely result is that you will make the people you alienate even more committed to their side by cutting them out of your life (they'll see you as unreasonable, as opposed to experiencing some sort of miraculous turn around of insight). So in the end, all remains the same, perfect.
> Half the country effectively voted in favor of torture.
> Such people rarely change their beliefs.
You honestly believe that 50% of the country rarely change their beliefs? That we are actually divided into the "rational good people" and the "religiously fevered bad people"?
Most people that voted for "the other side" did so because they thought it would be better for their jobs, better for their taxes, voted the same as the rest of their family, were misinformed, or a million other reasons that has nothing to do with them being unshakable ideologues incapable of being convinced otherwise in the next election and not deserving of your contact. The fact that you view half the population of this country that way is quite frightening.
I say they are lacking empathy. If you support a consequence for someone who burgles your house, by the same token you should support a consequence for someone who supports torture. Obviously (unless you're lacking empathy) your job or taxes are lower priority than taking a stance against torture.
Projecting much? You aren't showing much empathy to anyone that doesn't share your political views. The CIA under Bush tortured folks, and the CIA under Obama killed American citizens with drones.
That's the old "if you're intolerant against intolerance, you're intolerant yourself" argument. A good person is against all forms of evil, and can't be made "bad" that way.
I don't have a problem with people being killed by drones, American citizens or no, when that's the best viable way to prevent greater violence.
No I don't. It's "good" to support the best viable way to prevent greater violence, even if that way involves violence. These things are clear: torture is rarely the best viable way, and it's been used unnecessarily.
Spoken like someone who's always had the privilege of never being unemployed. I love it when people talk down to people that can't make ends meat and explain to them from an ivory tower how their concerns and family don't matter as much.
I believe the suggestion was more along the lines that plenty of people who voted for the "evil torture party AKA:GOP" were not actually knowingly voting to support torture, but instead voting for the candidate that espoused economic policies beneficial, or at least, the least detrimental to their own personal interests.
It's hypocritical to blame one side for torture, when the other side instead just started doing assassinations via drone. If you truly believe anyone who voted Republican supported torture, you must admit anyone who voted Democrat supports assassinations.
Full Disclosure: I've voted Libertarian in every presidential election since I've been eligible to vote. I see hypocrisy and political spin on ALL sides of the discussion.
Voters have an ethical responsibility to gauge the goodness of the viable choices. It was clear in 2000 and 2004 what the best choice was.
It isn't hypocritical to be for drone assassinations where that's the best viable way to prevent greater violence.
> If you truly believe anyone who voted Republican supported torture, you must admit anyone who voted Democrat supports assassinations.
No, I've said many times here that whoever votes for the lesser evil is blameless for the things that party does that they disagree with. Voting for the lesser evil gives you line-item support, because you made the best possible choice. You can't be made "bad" when you couldn't have done more to support good.
If you are for closing Gitmo (or at least the nefarious aspects of it) and you didn't vote for the greater evil party, you are blameless on that matter, regardless whether your representatives only pretend to care.
That is a childish sentiment; those people will still exist in the world and still vote, even if you pretend they don't.
Only sustained, long-term communication and engagement creates lasting cultural change. That means talking to the people you know who disagree with you. In fact if you know them, you're the best person to change their mind.
If you don't believe this can work, compare the political status of gay marriage in 2004 vs 2014.
It's not pretending they don't exist, it's meting out a consequence for their actions, so they don't get away with supporting evil scot-free.
We now have better support for gay marriage largely because of youth becoming of age to vote [1]. The youth are open-minded. Go ahead and tell the person you're ostracizing why you're doing it. But odds of seeing a change are nil.
How about cutting people out of our lives who are so petty and small-minded they think people should "pay a price for their nefarious [vote for a party I disagree with on some issues]?"
We're far from that, with most people being unwilling to mete a consequence to those who vote for evil. When adopted by all the good people, my attitude would lead to a fairer world, if only after a Civility War.
I'm still searching for a society in history that engages in torture against its opponents that doesn't eventually turn to torturing its own citizens. They will, of course, be labeled terrorists when that happens, but that time is coming.
When that story came out of Chicago a few years ago about a two decade history of torturing inmates to get them to confess to crimes, we asked how that could go on for so long. Well, apparently you can torture powerless people of color in Chicago without consequence. They were only torturing "bad" people, weren't they?
I get ill listening to the "arguments" for torture. "Well, it works." I want to drop my head into my hands. The efficiency expert's answer to moral questions. But what about a ticking bomb? Can't Jack Bauer put a bullet in a prisoner's knee to get him to talk? The Israeli's have the process down: They torture supposedly because of a ticking bomb, a time limit, whatever, but then they take a break for the Sabath. Gotta keep those priorities in mind.
If torture "worked", does that mean we have no limits? Just animals ripping the face off our prey?
I'm not very religious. What are Christians thinking when they allow this to happen? Has the iron law of Paul taken over from the Prince of Peace? If there is one piece of evidence that the US is a post-Christian country, this is it.
> The non-religious are the only group of which a majority opposes torture.
Notice how all the "religious" groups aren't defined by religion alone, but also by the qualifier "White". That's important, because if you go to the source [0], you see that the Race/Religion combination suggests the conclusion you describe because of its blend of race and religion together in some of its categories, but if you look at the Race breakdown, you see that Whites have large majority support for torture (66/25), while Non-Whites do not. Which makes the fact that the Race/Religion breakdown shows that the identified "religious" groups it breaks out all have majority support -- when those "religious" groups are White evangelical protestant (69/20), White non-evangelical Protestant (75/22), and White Catholic (66/23)-- somewhat less significant in religious terms than it seems at first.
If you follow public opinion polling in the US much, you'll find that this is quite common, and that many conclusions presented based on media polls about the relation between religiosity and other views are based entirely, for at least the Christian groups covered by the poll supporting the argument, on what White members of those religious groups believe.
Its extremely common in public opinion polling in the US, and I've never seen an explanation for it. If the subsamples of, e.g., various non-White Catholic, evangelical, etc., groups were too small to report, you'd expect that they'd just not do a race breakdown at all, and report the overall Catholic, evangelical, etc.
I suspect that the explanation might be that not only are the non-White subsamples too small, but the racial composition of the various religious groups in the polls is (because of sample size issues) often not representative of the racial composition of the groups in the population and the sample size of the non-White subgroups in the religious groups is too small, so that its quite likely that the overall numbers for the religious groups are distorted as a result of the racial demographics being non-representative, and they don't have meaningful numbers for most of the racial subgroups, but they do have meaningful numbers for the White subgroup.
OTOH, this often results in even more misleading presentation, where the White subgroup of each religious group is all that is reported, but news articles based on the poll still treat that as if it was a result for the religious group as a whole. And it doesn't explain why the non-religious group doesn't get the same treatment, because it almost certainly would have at least as much of the same problem.
It'd probably be better -- for media polls, and media coverage of polls at least -- to either do polls with a big enough sample that your sub-samples in various non-White race/religious subgroups are big enough to report on or just not report religious breakdowns at all where the only way you feel the numbers can be meaningful is just to report the White subgroup for religious groups.
I'm non-religious myself, but I have to think those results are conditioned by an underlying partisan divide. If there were sufficient numbers to support it, I'd want to see crosstabs for religiosity controlling for political ideology.
Pretty much all oppressive states have at one time or another used torture to stay in power. The good news is that we can learn from their mistakes: No torture method publicly known has been shown to "work" in the sense that you can trust the results.
A person under torture will tell you whatever it is you want to hear. This has been shown again and again. The only time where this is useful is if you can keep the methods under wrap and use the confessions to your advantage PR-wise. This is important to keep in mind to understand a proponent's agenda.
If you want to see torture prosecutions, write a letter to your editor calling out your elected officials by name (source below). I did it, so can you!
How to get your senators' and representatives' attention on any issue without being a wealthy donor | Protip from a former Senate intern[1].
--------
An email to your senator or representative may result in a form letter response and a phone call to the office may amount to a tally mark on an administrative assistant's notepad. But, for any given policy concern, if you want to get their attention a letter to the editor in one of your state's 5-10 biggest newspapers that mentions them specifically BY NAME is the way to go. If your message is directed to your representative, pick a newspaper that is popular in your district.
That is the crucial thing to know--the rest of this post is an explanation of why I know this is true.
I know this because, when I interned in the D.C. office of a senator one summer, one of the duties I shared was preparing a document that was distributed internally both online and in paper format. This document was made every day and comprised world news articles, national news, state news, and any letters to the editor in the 5-10 largest newspapers within the state that mentioned the senator by name. I was often the person who put that document on his desk, and it was the first thing he read every morning after arriving to the office.
I began to suspect that this was standard operating procedure because several other senators' offices share the same printer in the basement of the Russell Senate Office building, and I saw other interns doing the exact same procedures that I was involved in.
Since the internship, I've conferred with other Senate and House employees past and present and determined that most--if not all--offices use essentially the same procedure.
And while we're at it, we should sanction those -- like the New York Times -- who enabled and shielded the torturers via a consistent editorial policy -- solidly in place for 12 years -- of never referring to the practice of torture by name, but instead employing that famous dystopian euphemism: "Harsh Interrogation Techniques."
I'm voting this up even though I think it's a horrendous idea. Here's why:
The problem isn't that there wasn't a crime: it certainly looks like there was. I am outraged by parts of what I've read. The problem was that the system sought to legally justify it. The problem is that we changed the system so that a good portion of people believe there was no crime. If somebody is told by the system that there is no crime, we can't then go backwards in time and declare there was one. History shows us that such legal application is always more destructive to society than the original incident.
An important concept to understand is "criminalizing politics". That's when politicians, who rotate through office and are expected to spend most of their lives as private citizens, make decisions that could be criminal but do not involve personal gain.
We elect people to make hard choices that involve results that could be construed in other contexts as criminal, especially with respect to foreign policy. We always have.
I do not like any of this, but it's very important to understand that the problems here are systemic. A different president and VP were just as likely to make the same choices. Want to go back and try people for Japanese interment? All the rendition done prior to 2000? Assassinations and coups overseas? Spying on MLK? Such an emotional attitude is understandable, but you just can't continue a government like that. If the system was acting as best as it could, and it screws up? You fix it. You don't get the firing squads out. That's banana republic territory.
So let's fix the system so it doesn't happen again. If we want somebody to hang, start a nice show trial. But since folks were acting in good faith (which is more important than "just doing their jobs"), pardon them and let's move on. There is no justice to be had here. We need to learn. This is not the time to let emotional outrage lead us into hurting each other needlessly.
You already had laws preventin torture. Your politicians ignored those laws and used devious contructions to avoid those laws - "enemy combatants" and "no longer an enemy combatant" being a useful example. You pay Afghan forces for prisoners, you torture those prisoners, and then when they haven't given you any useful information you declare them "no longer an enemy combatant". This construction avoids the need for trial; for innocent until proven guilty; for observing the geneva convention; for observing the UDHR and a bunch of other international law.
Your post, and I say this politely, fucking sucks. They knew they were breaking the law; they paid lawyers to create bizarre interpretations of those laws; they then strongly suggested to subordinates that torture was desirable without actually ordering it, leaving those low pay employees to take the fall and the prison sentences.
"Only following orders" has never been an excuse for committing atrocities and war crimes.
I don't believe the claim of good faith that you propose: I think that they knew they were committing crimes and that they intended to get away with it, because they could count on people like you to not hold them accountable.
I'm so displeased with the government taking actions like this, I think it's preferable if we do cause a massive panic and shut down the system at a high level -- even while we let some of the bureaucracies run -- until we can sort this out.
I think that we need to make it clear that it's unacceptable to cross some lines in the name of "making a hard choice", and that there are personal consequences to signing off on those kinds of crimes -- that as a nation, we mean it when we declare certain kinds of actions beyond the authorization of government.
Were it more timely, I also think that we should prosecute on a number of the other things you listed. Alas, we didn't, because of thinking like yours, and it seems merely to have encouraged more lawlessness from officials.
You didn't actually propose fixing anything: you merely advocated doing more of the same and hoping that it just gets better, nor did you propose any reason that prosecuting people for knowingly breaking the law wouldn't lead to a change in the behavior of officials.
> The problem is that we changed the system so that a good portion of people believe there was no crime.
I don't think any of the principals in this atrocity ever really "believed" there was no crime. They decided, as Dick Cheney told Meet The Press earlier this year, "I have no problem as long as we achieve our objective." They didn't (and still don't) care whether torture is a "crime". All they cared about was making sure the system didn't get in their way.
This is a great point, but I don't think it leads to no prosecutions. As you point out, the problems here are systemic - and a vital part of the system is accountability.
In a better world, the mid-level bureaucracy of the military and CIA would be a bulwark against this kind of abuse. Politicians will always be opportunists, and the low-level ranks will always contain psychopaths. But the mid-level people can keep both in check, if they have the motivation.
Twenty years from now, when a president asks "is there anything else we can do to this guy?", the answer from the CIA director should be "no, or I'll be prosecuted". The answer from the DOJ should be "no, or we'll be disbarred". The answer from the military should be "we'll resign before following that order, because it will get us sent to the Hague".
Prosecuting people for human rights abuses is not the same as criminalizing politics. It doesn't matter if they thought it was legal or even if it actually was legal.
And Justice Douglass (from the US supreme court) agreed with that: "I thought at the time and still think that the Nuremberg trials were unprincipled, Law was created ex post facto to suit the passion and clamor of the time." [1]
Ex post facto is also explicitly forbidden by the US consitution (Article 1, sections 9, 10) [2], and by the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Article 11, section 2) [3].
On a technical level, you can argue that torture was already illegal under US law, however the torturers were advised by agents of the State that what they were doing was legal, so ex-post-facto could very reasonably apply. There may be people high up on the chain of command who can be prosecuted under US law, but for the most part prosecutions would have to go through international law.
So you're saying that anything done by the state should be legal, and if you have a problem then you should apply diplomatic (ultimately military) pressure? Sounds like a recipe for atrocities and then war (like in nazi Germany). It's unfortunate that the high level sociopaths will probably get away with it, but we should still prosecute the lower level sociopaths who did the torturing. This will make it hard to order people to do this in the future.
Ask yourself two questions:
Is it ok to kidnap someone, lock them in your basement, beat them and rape them?
Does some shit written on a piece of paper make it ok?
I am saying that if the state said something is legal, it should not then prosecute people for having done it while the state was saying it is legal. If you have a problem with what another state is doing (and you are a state), then you should apply diplomatic/military pressure; I do not know what other recourse you have.
In this case, what was done is illegal under international law, and was illegal under international law at the time it was done, so people can be tried in international court without ex post facto concerns.
I am one of those people who disagree with the Nuremberg trials. If something atrocious happened, but was legal, then we should make it illegal and accept the fact that some people got away with doing horrible things.
Any article and ensuing discussion that degrades into who is or is not behaving like Nazis in less than 2 hours is one that should be removed ASAP.
Edit: I don't give a shit who is "right". My point is that any discussion that degrades this badly should not be here. Go somewhere else to discuss this stuff.
As we are discussing the immoral actions of a government and its agents, most notably imprisonment without trial in military-run camps, in which inmates are tortured based on instructions from the top of the hierarchy - this has clear parallels with some of the actions of Nazi Germany.
To compare this behaviour is not 'degrading' the conversation at all, on the contrary it's quite relevant to compare and contrast.
Government agents kidnapped, rape, beat, tortured, and killed innocent people. This is pretty similar to what the nazis did and it is a fair comparison.
The guidelines don't unequivocally support your position, IMHO. Your comment, though, makes a good case for it. I'll stop now, since this is getting off-topic, but I appreciate you taking the time to clarify your stand.
EDIT: I think everyone on HN has heard of Godwin's Law. It's useful, but can also be a lazy way to quash meaningful discussion.
On average? Not a lot, I'd imagine. But it occasionally will. This tangent we've gone on off on, for example, though I'm not sure you'd agree. I think @hemantv's assertion would have served the discussion better had it been framed as a question:
"Isn't this a lot like the Nuremberg defense?", for example.
That link is about appropriate submissions, not the comments below the submissions.
As this article has already been upvoted over 200 times (implying some interest from hackers), trying to stifle further discussion is rather a lost cause.
The problem in the system is not the layers of obfuscation and flimflammery. The problem is that too few people are willing to not only question authority, or even just peer pressure, but also to defy it outright.
As long as dilution of responsibility exists, that problem will remain intractable. When someone follows an unlawful order, both the person that issued it and the person that obeyed it need to bear the responsibility. And to support that, then when someone refuses an unlawful order, that person has to be shielded from retribution and retaliation.
And if someone tries to blow the whistle on unethical behavior, they shouldn't be imprisoned for life or be forced to flee to Russia.
You're not going to cultivate a culture of individual responsibility by pardoning everyone who should have plonking known better than to kidnap and torture people while thumbing their nose at due process.
All gov't workers take an oath to uphold the Constitution. When a law is clearly unconstitutional they have the obligation to work against it, not abide by it. So we can definitely declare that torture was illegal retroactively.
indeed, the rule of law and rule by law are not the same thing. just because something is legal doesn't mean it's just.
i think it's important to continue fighting for justice and for people to show that they don't want to live under a legal regime that accepts these kinds of things.
I don't necessarily agree that prosecutions would be a bad idea, but I do agree that for reasons given by plenty of other people in this discussion, they're not going to happen.
So you're right: we should turn our efforts to fixing the system.
"Whoever fights with monsters must be careful lest he become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you." - Nietzsche
Based on their actions (which ultimately may have not yielded anything useful either) the torturers and their masters are monsters of the worst kind - state sanctioned.
So now why stop at just releasing the report?
Take the next logical step & prosecute these sociopaths.
> "Whoever fights with monsters must be careful lest he become a monster."
I believe this is one of the overlooked but very important reasons not to torture. The torturers are also damaged, in their own way. We should not require this of anyone.
The "School of the Americas" a US military training facility for middle and south american militaries has been known for training some of worst human rights violators in the region. So it is not like the US government is new to the idea of creating monsters.
It would be an interesting bit of schadenfreude, if countries imposed some sort of sanctions against the US over harboring war criminals.
The State Department would probably release statements of insane hypocrisy given how they're perfectly fine preaching about human rights when OTHER countries violate them.
The very least that I expect out of this is for the International Criminal Court to convict them as war criminals. Whether those convicted will actually do any prison time is another issue. However, US will have to live with the shame for decades that it's harboring war criminals, and it may even impact its dealings with other countries in the future.
US will be in the history books as a country that not only allowed, but keeps condoning torture by refusing to punish the torturers. Brennan even implied that he's not ruling out the use of torture in the future.
Maybe eventually, some new US president will decide that it's time to prosecute and imprison them so US can have a "clean start" in its international relations.
>>> US will have to live with the shame for decades that it's harboring war criminals, and it may even impact its dealings with other countries in the future.
Clearly not a student of history.
The US has been harboring criminals since WWII when Operation Paperclip brought Nazi scientists back here to help build the atomic bomb.
>>> US will be in the history books as a country that not only allowed, but keeps condoning torture by refusing to punish the torturers.
Just like every other country in the world. I certainly don't condone what they did, but on a relative scale, it's a pretty minor considering what other countries have done and still actively do. If they don't include the atrocities the US committed in Vietnam in history books, you can be assured they won't touch this either.
>> Maybe eventually, some new US president will decide that it's time to prosecute and imprison them so US can have a "clean start" in its international relations.
Obama already tried being nice to these people we're at war with and look what it got us. He tried to have a "clean slate" with the terrorists, even said he would negotiate with the Taliban. Yes, the same Taliban who behead criminals, do not allow women rights and approve of honor killings. Because you know, he thought you could reason with these people - right?
The ICC can't do anything. "The ICJ held that the U.S. had violated international law by supporting the Contras in their rebellion against the Nicaraguan government and by mining Nicaragua's harbors. The United States refused to participate in the proceedings after the Court rejected its argument that the ICJ lacked jurisdiction to hear the case. The U.S. later blocked enforcement of the judgment by the United Nations Security Council and thereby prevented Nicaragua from obtaining any actual compensation."
What? nah. The number of countries that officially have no-torture policy are few. They need US for their economic growth. So, they would be silent. The other countries don't care. And I don't think USA officially feels any shame. I know many of its people do though but they are powerless and minority
"If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" - Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
They won't be prosecuted, of course. I ostracized those in my life who supported it. That may be the best anyone can do against it, given our 2-party oligopoly.
At least, as long as they stay in the US. I've read that a few countries will be arresting and prosecuting any participating agents the second they enter their borders. Not that that will solve problems here though.
Correction: The UN has said that anyone can if they want to.
I guess this means we should throw all the Democrats under the bus who suddenly had amnesia about knowing anything about the techniques being used too?
The report (embedded below) shows that the CIA briefed at least 68 members of Congress on the CIA interrogation program, including "enhanced interrogation techniques" (EITs) . It details the dates of all congressional briefings and in most cases, the members of Congress in attendance and the specific subjects discussed. Keep in mind though, that the topic for each one of these meetings was interrogation of prisoners.
For example in April 2002 both the House (HPSCI) and Senate (SSCI) committees on intelligence were briefed on the "Ongoing Interrogations of Abu Zubaydah, who was mentioned in the Feinstein report. According to the report, at this time EITs were referenced but there is no evidence they were discussed in detail. However later meetings not only discussed but gave examples of EITs being used, (but attendees weren't mentioned). Finally near the end of 2002 we see that the most Senior members of the House and Senate committees had meetings totally devoted to EITs.
>Since the day President Obama took office, he has failed to bring to justice anyone responsible for the torture of terrorism suspect.
This is such an important topic, that it is a shame it always has to be discussed in the political context (i.e. Obama failed to bring justice anyone from the Bush administration).
#1. Obama's administration continued using the Bush era Enhanced Interrogation Techniques; therefore, politically he could not pursue anyone from Bush's administration without subjecting his own administration to the same...including himself.
#2 From a legal standpoint anyone who actually engaged in these alleged acts of torture would have a legal defense, they relied on Government officials and attorneys who authorized/ordered them to perform these interrogations. Whether the officials/attorneys were right or wrong in their judgment, this is a lawful defense recorgnized by US criminal courts. See US v. Baker, 546 F.2d 940 (D.C. Cir. 1976).
> Out of interest, is #2 basically just the Nuremberg defence?
It is somewhat different, its "I relied on the entity now trying to prosecute me". This does refer to the same entity as "Just following orders of my superiors" when the entity prosecuting you is also the one you worked for, but its a substantively different defense in the general case (and note, in the Nuremberg tribunals, this defense would not have been equivalent to the so-called "Nuremberg defense" even in the entity it refered to.)
There is a very good reason for a legal system to have this defense as a bedrock principle that applies without exception within the legal system, and there is a very good reason for crimes against humanity and war crimes to have international tribunals with personal jurisdiction to try them so that this defense doesn't become a shield for perpetrators that happen to be backed by the top officials of a government at the time they act.
This legal defense is embedded in US jurisprudence. Most people would be familiar with the concept of "mistake of law" not being a lawful defense. In other words, it is not a recognized defense to say one did the act, but should not be accountable because they did not know it was criminal. However, one exception is if a government official gives a interpretation of the law, even if that interpretation is wrong, then relying on the government official's interpretation becomes a lawful defense.
Therefore, it is a little different that the Nuremberg defense, as I understand it, where that defense is essentially claiming you were ordered by superiors to take an action that was unlawful.
So the practical difference being in one case you know or believe what you are being commanded to do is criminal and the other case you are specifically informed by some government official with authority that the act you are being ordered to do is lawful.
Thanks for the clarification. That makes a lot of sense. Still a damnable outrage, but I can see more of an argument for not prosecuting the torturers.
I do find it interesting that the replies concentrated on point #2 as a stopping point.
On point #1: If I, personally, had to give up my job and perhaps even face personal abuse, in order to stop someone from being tortured....I think I might manage that.
Maybe Obama's administration could manage to summon a similar degree of bravery?
Does anyone honestly believe that the current administration which has: 1) doubled down on the Bush admins attack on the Fourth Amendment; 2) attacked the 1st Amendment directly (something even Bush/Ashcroft didn't do..) and 3) run what is an arguably similar program in its moral and ethical ambiguity(Drone strikes) to the interrogation techniques; would even think about going after the previous administration!?!? Give me a break, that's beyond laughable.
This piece by the Times is about what you'd expect from an organization that has lost its grip on reality. What's worse is that people actually pay attention to the Times at this point. Sadly, what we lack in this country is an honest journalistic broker that can objectively communicate about the political realities we have in front of us and our shortcomings as a nation and an electorate.
Here's the thing, all of us that vote (and those that don't), are responsible for the mess in D.C.. The people that inhabit the beltway are simply taking advantage of our apathy and incompetence as an electorate..nothing more, nothing less...it's up to us, as the electorate, to purge our government of the latent corruption and decay that has come to permeate that town. Until we take up that charge in a meaningful way, we can't even have a discussion about topics such as this, it's just a waste of time..
Obama is a disgrace. The reason he was elected over Hillary was because he initially took a harder line against the war, the spying and the torture. At the end of the Bush administration the American people voted overwhelmingly to break from the recent past, and Obama inexplicably betrayed our democracy. And I have my doubts that it will ever fully recover.
And yet when polled, citizens seem to mostly be in favor of the torture the CIA was involved in.
> The reason he was elected over Hillary was because he initially took a harder line against the war, the spying and the torture.
Have you considered that this is a vast oversimplification, and you're mostly just projecting your pet issues onto 70 million other people? I don't want to just regurgitate talking points, but saying he "inexplicably betrayed our democracy" is probably only inexplicable to you because you haven't wanted to take the time to think it through.
An attempt to prosecute Bush would basically be political suicide, severely damaging his legacy and cementing complete government inaction for the remainder of his term. You can say that's a betrayal of our country, but calling it inexplicable is just silly. Also, as far as I know, I don't remember one of his stump speech promises being to taking the unprecedented step of pushing for the prosecution of a former President. You can project these ideas onto people if you wish, but no one will ever be able to live up to your standards, much less the President of the United States -- a person that has arguably the hardest, most complex job in the world.
The reality is, the president doesn't have a ton of power over the workings of the vast bureaucracy. And remember that the intelligence folks start the President's day, every day with their briefing. Makes manipulation of the executive easy.
I didn't realize that we had not ratified the treaty. Considering how involved we were in the Nuremburg Trials, I had assumed we would be just as keen about the ICC.
Naïvely, I didn't take into effect the extent of the USG's cranial-rectal inversion syndrome.
For all you liberals out there who want to go after Bush, don't forget that Obama has been killing people indiscriminately with drone strikes. Something tells me you'll be less likely to go after him, indicating the real source of your outrage.
The CIA report was written solely by Democrats with an ax to grind, and sought no information from an opposing side.
Go back and watch any 9/11 news video (as it happened) and put yourself in the shoes of those who struggled to find direction during that time. I personally don't think torture is a good decision, but those in power did it out of precaution to identify possible future acts.
When the next terrorist attack occurs, please think about the bullshit you wrote here.
If it helps any, I agree with Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch that US drone attacks in Yemen and Pakistan have likely broken international human rights law and should be investigated as war crimes.
I want a full, serious, and public war crimes investigation, to include drone attacks and torture. If we find out that Obama, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Frank had a secret meeting to allow torture then I want them and all who knew about it behind bars. Torture is illegal under US and international law. The law allows no extenuating circumstances.
Are you with me?
When ISIS dressed James Foley in orange then beheaded him, do you think that was a deliberate reference to Guantanamo or just coincidence?
If we find out that those predicted attacks of yours occur because someone wanted revenge for having their parent, or sibling, or friend anally raped by US orders ... then what? More torture? Which will help because?
"Sought no information from an opposing side"? Are you saying the CIA is on the same side as the committee members? Because the members certainly sought information from the CIA, which must count as 'an opposing side'. Good on you for saying there are multiple sides; what do you think the sides are?
And you must despise Senator Mike Gravel, who put the Pentagon Papers in the public record without first seeking information from an opposing side. Do you just like it when the Executive branch systematically lies, not only to the public but also to Congress, and tries to keep it hidden? I don't.
> but those in power did it out of precaution to identify possible future acts.
That simply doesn't matter. Torture is illegal in all circumstances, reprehensible, and completely ineffective. There's no justification, period.
The "collateral damage" of drone strikes, and all of our quasi-war military actions, concerns me greatly, but the fact that drones are involves is immaterial. We've been killing civilians and combatants outside of declared war and emergency situations for a long time now. Maybe that all needs to be looked at again with the result being possible indictments. If so it would go back before Obama and Bush, to at least every post-WWII president.
Your comment is partisan tripe, absolutely worthless. This has nothing to do with liberal/conservative/Rep/Dem and everything to do with a belief in fundamental human rights. 10,000 terrorist attacks on American soil would not convince me that torture is a valid tactic.
Even if you find yourself lacking all morality and humanity, you should still be aware that torture has been proven time and time again over hundreds of years to be utterly useless in getting truthful information out of the victim. There is no justification whatsoever, and there is no intel being gained via torture that could not be better gained in other ways.
The rational conclusion is that torture is not only barbaric, but pointless as well. 9/11 and the irrational stupidity that happened afterwards should not be held up as some kind of divine justification for war crimes.
Yes. Prosecute them, put them all in prison. If the US won't do that, the rest of the world has to oblige the moral and legal duty of prosecuting anyone involved in the torture of humans. That will restrict their travels wastly, right Dick?
I can't think of a worse idea than prosecuting Bush administration officials. Jailing the previous administration would set a terrible precedent, and would fatally undermine the stability of our government.
There are many people who are convinced, e.g., that abortion is murder and that politicians who enable it ought to be prosecuted. Or, more on topic, that Diane Feinstein is a traitor for making these torture memos public. They believe this with as much moral certitude as anyone here believes torture is a crime. It is only a matter of time before another right-wing president is in the White House, and when there is I don't want there to be a precedent for jailing one's political rivals.
So you are saying we shouldn't prosecute the executive branch even though they clearly broke and sanctioned breaking existing laws. When should we prosecute them? What makes them different from tyrants?
Also your example doesn't make any sense. Creating a law for abortion is not even in the same category as breaking current laws. This is not purely an issue of morality, it's about the rule of law as well.
You're erroneously comparing actual on-the-books illegal crime with crimes against belief systems. Hypothetically if enabling abortion or publicizing documents were illegal the way torture is, then those people ought to be jailed, too, if the law means anything. What shouldn't matter is someone's occupation or status. This should be obvious.
Under your proposed system, no politicians of sufficient office would ever be tried for a crime related to their office (as long as it was for the right reason)? This seems like a very poor incentive system.
I do agree with you that prosecution would not be good for stability. However, maintaining a separate rule of law for those in office is not good for stability, either.
A few low level torturers were prosecuted and put in prisons. Their bosses had the political language to endorse and encourage torture while using language vague enough to escape prosecution.
"looking forward" (as the article attributes to being Obama's argument for not prosecuting) is something one does to forgive others. self-punishment is something one does to prove trust to others. The looking forward policy of the US was important in the construction of the Marshal Plan. But now is the time they need to show they are trustworthy arbitrators of any moral ground. If they fail to prosecute anyone for torture they set a horrible precedent but more importantly the lack of correction turns any future moral arguments into platitudes.
This article deserves juxtaposition with this scene from the Act of Killing:
I still find it interesting what the major news websites and channels choose to make front page headlines with or not. In the world I want to live in, there'd be a lot more daily hammering with (apparently factual statements) like: "US Gov Violates Geneva Convention on Torture" ever since the Senate CIA report came out. The US is signatory to that, ratified it by Congress, and indeed was one of its architects in the post-WW2 landscape. They repeatedly posture themselves as one of the Good Guy nations, the ultimate White Hat lawman. They have tortured and violated international law, to which they are signatory, on basic human rights and ethical behavior.
> Bush pouring water on terrorists' faces and making them stand in place for long periods is bad.
Are you deliberately trying to phrase torture to sound benign? Or have you not read about what went on? This is not an accurate description of the torture practices that were used, not the ones you were trying to describe, nor the ones you left out.
Yeah, torture is bad.
> Obama dropping drone missiles on picnics and weddings killing Americans and their whole families is OK.
I don't think so. It sounds like you don't either. I'm not sure if you are trying to accuse the NYT editorial board of hypocrisy, or the commenters in this thread, or someone else -- not entirely sure who you think has the opinions you are parodying. But for what it's worth, the NYT editorial board doesn't think it's okay either.
I had read those opinions by the Times and they mildly disapprove but their tone was much harsher for Bush. Who is hypocritical? Not only the Times, but the Senate Democrats who spent years investigating and released a huge report on Bush's so-called torture, but nothing about Obama's drone strikes, which kills Americans, and suspected terrorists and their families, along with anyone else with 100 feet.
And no, I don't think it's torture. I also think death is worse than any technique they used. If you asked all the people who were waterboarded if they preferred waterboarding or death, I am sure they would all vote for waterboarding.
I am truly frightened by the fact that you probably aren't alone in thinking that, for instance, shoving something into someone's rectum with 'excessive force' causing anal prolapse isn't torture. I would ask if you feel the same way if it's someone other than the American government doing it to Americans as you do when it's the American government doing it to Muslim people, but I don't really want to continue the conversation, it's sickening.
It is something that apparently happened, approved or not. Does that not trouble you, that such a thing could happen, by those charged with upholding our liberty and safety, and there is nothing done to make sure it never happens again? Do the survivors, or the families of those killed, deserve some kind of apology or compensation?
We could argue about the 'approved techniques', as actually implemented, constituting torture too (I think they do, and think if they were done to you you'd agree -- I think your opinion is based on confidence that they would NEVER be done to you because they are only done to 'bad people', and the goverment would never confuse you for a 'bad person' -- you're probably right, only because you're American and white; in fat there are _numerous_ cases of 'mistaken identity' among those who were kidnapped and tortured), but really, neither of us are going to win such an argument on the internet.
It's an attempt to transfer the world's collective disdain for the Bush Administration to Obama, by suggesting that Obama is the one guilty of crimes against humanity, while Bush and Cheney were guilty of, at best, minor pranks and hazing. And that Americans should remember this the next time we go to the polls, and vote the Red Team back in.
But I'll go ahead and say that I think torture by the authorities is worse than murder by the authorities, especially if you include all the knock-on effects of trying to justify it.
Just as Obama will never be impeached, imprisoned, or in any other way brought to justice for his atrocities committed against the Constitution, the people in the highest offices responsible for the torture will never see punishment. Rightly so I say, there is nothing wrong with interrogating terrorists.
I hope you're joking. Mainly because this line of thinking is easily shown to be slippery. Sure, let's say interrogating terrorists is always good. But what defines a terrorist? All of a sudden black and white becomes a murk, once again.
If two people kidnapped your wife and children saying they would rape and slaughter them in 24 hours, and you somehow caught one of the two culprits, you would do whatever it took to save your family. Whatever it took. And if you say you wouldn't, then you're either a lier, or you are a cruel and cowardly person. On the world scale, performing non-lethal EIT on one terrorist in order to save 500 or 5000 or 50000 lives is both reasonable and moral. To think otherwise is just shocking.
Would you feel bad if person you found turned out to be unrelated, you had him confused with someone else? And then after keeping him locked in your basement for a few years and torturing him a bunch, maybe a little bit of rape too, you accidentally killed him? And it turns out it was just some dude?
Would you feel bad? Would you feel guilty? Would you think about the family of the guy you accidentally killed, because you thought that was how to save your family somehow, would you think about the family of the dead guy in your basement, and how they must feel? Would you think that, it turns out, maybe your methods had been disastrous, monstrous even, and should be revisited?
Not if you're Dick Cheney.
Okay, now let's say you're not the one who had the wife and children kidnapped, you're the brother of the guy THAT guy picked up accidentally thinking he was a kidnapper, locked in a basement for a few years, tortured, raped, and killed.
And to do it on 500 terrorists, where in 499 cases it didn't lead to anything and in the 500th case it led to saving 500 lives is it still moral and reasonable?
Apart of course from the fact that any information revealed during torture is usually useless. And of course the fact that it's, you know, illegal.
If someone kidnapped, raped, and murdered your father and brother, would it be justifiable to join a militia opposing them? I think you're basically advocating for IS here.
My hope is that those people that we don't see or hear about that work around injustices like these are doing what they can to keep some sort of balance. I try to convince myself sometimes that these people that love their country and want to do good are trying to use what power they have to make things right. I know for a fact that there are amazing people working in government and I hope the good stuff these people do just doesn't get much attention.
I love my country, I served, I consider myself a patriot, but I worry about my children and their children. I don't expect much, if anything, to come of this and the fact that that feeling is common for me as an American puts knots in my stomach.