The Guantánamo "Suicides": A Camp Delta sergeant blows the whistle | Hacker News Reader

The Guantánamo "Suicides": A Camp Delta sergeant blows the whistle

harpers.org

82 pointsdantheman37 comments

Not Traditional HN Fare, but I think an extremely important article.

Agreed. It may be Off Topic, but it's incredibly important to shine a light on these things - unpleasant and uncomfortable as they may be. It's easy for us to look at history and marvel at the inhumanity that we're capable of, but Milgram's experiments (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment) showed that an individual's conscience is a reticent faculty, when isolated in the face of authority. It's imperative that we talk openly, and agree as a society what's allowed and what's simply unacceptable.

It's better to steer clear of political issues which are covered more than adequately elsewhere.

They are by their nature divisive and tend to make people upset and/or angry. This coarsens the atmosphere and makes reasoned and intelligent discussion far less feasible.

It's already done so here. Look downthread, where, in an effort to make this story about torture and murder relevant to Hacker News, we've begun making an issue out of military censorship, as if that's what's imminentizing the demise of the Republic.

It's dispiriting that this article hasn't been flagged off the site yet.

Whats more dispiriting is that the number two article at this moment is about shoelace knots. I'd rather read this factual account than some crap about shoe laces given the choice between the two.

I can be upset and angry and still participate in a rational discussion. What will we do when an issue is both important and divisive? Will we avoid it because it's divisive and may upset people? Is not being upset more important than the free exchange of ideas?

This is Hacker News. Maybe I am projecting something here, but I thought of us as explorers of ideas. Do we want to prevent, to silence, discussion?

>I can be upset and angry and still participate in a rational discussion.

The problem is that it would only take a few people who can't remain rational for a tipping point to be reached whereby the overall quality of debate badly degrades. (That's when some of the most valuable contributors start to disappear.)

>What will we do when an issue is both important and divisive

If such a political issue affected hackers directly then there'd be no way to avoid that discussion.

>Do we want to prevent, to silence, discussion?

Of course not. And that's precisely why politics in general should be avoided.

Aside from the eve psych, I'm with Eliezer Yudkowsky on this:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/gw/politics_is_the_mindkiller/

"a few people who couldn't manage that"

That's what downvotes are for. That's why we should refrain from downvoting for disagreement and keeping it for shorting out comments that are damaging to the discussion.

Milgram's experiments showed that an individual's conscience is a reticent faculty

Note, however, that this study only selected people who responded as willing to participate in a "two-week study on prison life". That sounds appealing to some people more than others. Then again, so does military service.

Agreed. But I can read this on Reddit, that's not why people come to HN, and this is against the HN guidelines.

Please stop submitting these worthy articles to unrelated sites.

PS. It's also considered bad form to moderate polite comments you disagree with to zero.

Google maps has some good photos, you can even see the white van mentioned in the story in the woods.

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&...

Flagged. An important article for another site.

I disagree. Some things transcend that distinction and should be discussed in every community - they affect every human. And this is coming from somebody who isn't thrilled HN isn't as hard edged tech/startup-culture focused as it once was. On the front page right now I see: 'When work doesn't pay for the middle class' 'FBI broke law for years in phone record searches' 'Professor Is a Label That Leans to the Left' Flag those and I'll upvote you. But I'd like this one to get as many eyeballs as possible.

The mistake you're making here is thinking about it as a value judgement about the article. It's not. The article is solid. I read it. I've been following the story.

It simply has nothing to do with what Hacker News is about, and sticking it here to maximize the number of eyeballs it gets is an abuse of the site.

Here's some help, if the guidelines seem fuzzy:

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

There is nothing about this story that gratifies anyone's intellectual curiosity. Those of us who are inclined to believe stories reported in Harpers (myself included) already know about the torture problem. It isn't evidence of a new trend.

The rest of you reading this would be doing the site a favor if, instead of voting me up, you simply hit the "flag" button on the story.

Chinese censorship policy is considered fair game but American censorship policy isn't? Strange perspective.

This isn't censorship. You're welcome to submit the article to any site you want. I think it's a good article, and deserves to be read.

But this is forum for discussing technology, startups, and hacker-relevant topics.

Edit: if the article itself contains something about technology, it's clearly not the main subject, which is prisoner abuse.

"It was important, he said, that servicemen make no comments or suggestions that in any way undermined the official report. He reminded the soldiers and sailors that their phone and email communications were being monitored. The meeting lasted no more than twenty minutes."

-------

There is more, but you have to read the article.

I find this disintegration of moral standards a very hacker-worthy issue. Hackers have been on the forefront of the defense of civil rights in a moment when technology advances much faster than the law can react to it or society can absorb it.

A guy was arrested a couple days back because he jokingly vented his frustration on Twitter. Another had his face stamped on a most wanted criminals list seen around the planet because a technician found using his face would save him some work. We understand this changing technologies better than most. We can help.

Eric Raymond finds gun control to be a very hacker-worthy issue, and firmly believes that true hackers are all libertarians. Many people clearly believe that atheism is a hacker-worthy issue, because creationists are disrupting science classes. Where does it end? Nowhere. It never ends. You let one of these stories through, you let them all through, and bang, we're Reddit.

I see that this article is off the front page despite having around sixty up-votes. It has been replaced by an essay informing us that Bill Gates is on Twitter. I didn't submit this article, but I'm posting this in case you personally catch it tptacek, because I'm disappointed you've succeeded in shutting down discussion. And I'm also disappointed that a third of all comments made on this thread to date are by you and are focused on preempting discussion and accusing others of being off-topic. In most online environments that would count as trollish behavior.

Downvoting and flagging is one thing and I think you're certainly in your rights to use those tools to sculpt the sorts of discussions you want to take place here. Coopting interesting and informative threads by launching trollish attacks on the relevance of the material is another. Most of the replies to your post were perfectly civil.

As someone who is personally running a startup outside of the United States, I find that US policy on the War on Terror has a much stronger effect on my business (particularly through regulations affecting international money transfers, credit card processing and air travel) than a host of other issues including things like start-up visas or security vulnerabilities and other subjects you presumably consider much more on-topic given your own business. Articles that touch on these topics are on-topic to me.

So even disregarding the most interesting and relevant thing about this article - the fact that military censorship of communications technologies and then FOIA blackouts apparently kept this story away from the popular media for four years - it is not irrelevant as a policy issue for a lot of people who are not you. In the future, if you want to shut down a discussion by all means flag it, but don't ruin the discussion space for those who are actually curious what others think.

The military has censored communications since time immemorial.

I've been a factor in a lot of discussion on Hacker News that I haven't managed to "shut down".

What's shutting down this "discussion" is that there isn't anything to discuss productively.

We could continue trying to provoke a fruitless discussion by extrapolating further and further from the story; "the US is evil", etc. That might pick a pointless fight.

Thankfully, I think Hacker News is largely innoculated from discussions like that.

The fact of the matter is that this isn't an article about how the War On Terror affects startups, and it isn't an article about censorship. If you want to have a discussion about those topics, write a blog post.

It will be relevant to Hacker News, and I will vote it up.

I sympathize with your worries. I too don't want HN to become another Reddit or, worse, another Digg. I feel we have a good mix of deeply technical stories and some not so, but more important, we have good discussions.

Maybe the key is to keep the articles good.

Nobody has the formula to prevent a successful discussion site to turn into Slashdot, Digg or Reddit. I have faith we will eventually find it.

But it will be a shame if the only way to prevent a discussion site to become "uninhabitable" is by preventing certain topics. I like to think we can be mature enough.

A couple months ago I had a conversation with an experienced diplomat. He kindly reminded me not all cultures value democracy, freedom of speech and rule of law equally.

And it saddens me a lot to know I disagree with most of my fellow citizens about those values.

And it saddens me a lot to know I disagree with most of my fellow citizens about those values.

Most people's opinions about foreign policy are more or less identical to their opinions about sports: "our team yeah, their team boooo!"

The difference is that supporting soccer teams seldom becomes law.

That wasn't a value judgement about the topic, it was a value judgement about the quality of the discussion the topic produces.

The scope is different. China censors all its population and is very aggressive in doing so. This is more on the lines of "Here we do lots of bad things in order to protect the freedom of our country. Tell nobody about it. And, BTW, we will be watching you".

It's despicable either way.

I submit this comment as evidence for why articles like this are toxic to Hacker News. Note that we're now arguing about whether military censorship --- and, don't you people watch WW2 movies or M.A.S.H.? --- is evidence of some startling new trend.

I am not arguing about military censorship. It's understandable when they don't want their folks to blog about troop deployment or operational details of new weapons. I am arguing about using it to cover up crimes.

And there is the part about China. I am not sure I understood the comment and its motivations. I would like to explore why trevelian made the comparison.

We can learn a lot about ourselves by entering difficult discussions.

"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon."

I think this article shows an interesting and very disturbing phenomenon that would be considered impossible before 2001. It all depends on what you consider "new". Often in politics, 10 years is a very short time for something this magnitude to happen.

I find it rather disturbing because far too many pieces of a dystopian police state are in place. Again, in a country I would deem it impossible just 10 years ago.

We need more civil-rights lawyers and we need them fast. And not only in the US.

I think you gave up the rhetorical point of being able to cite the guidelines by making a comment saying that you flagged the story. I disagree with you because the guidelines themselves are intentionally fuzzy. There is no litmus test for what gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

The new trend here is not torture, but that several men are now known to have been tortured to death.

People were tortured to death in Abu Graihb.

I think it's time to revisit the guideline about "not posting about inappropriate comments".

I don't think it's time to revisit the guideline about not posting about politics and crime.

That is your opinion and I will stand for your right to say it. I would be disappointed if the folks who inhabit this site didn't agree.

As you pointed out, this is an important article. I would rather have it engage in discussing it here than on Slashdot or Reddit. One of the nicest things here on HN is that discussions are usually (one could say unusually) civil. I think "difficult" stories like this are important exercises for our community.

There are not many opportunities to practice that online.

This is an unenforceable standard: "off-topic: most articles about politics, crime, etc. unless they will promote civil discussions amongst reputable Hacker News users".

The original, ambiguous "most articles" is hard to enforce too. How do we define whether an article is one of the "most"?

Personally I like a definition based on depth -- most politics is not allowed, but deep, more intellectually heavy material from sources like the New Yorker and Harpers is ok, as it's very distinct from the types of reporting seen on TV.

"The new trend here is not torture, but that several men are now known to have been tortured to death."

Sadly, that is not a new trend:

In U.S. Report, Brutal Details of 2 Afghan Inmates' Deaths http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/20/international/asia/20abuse...

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