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Comment by crowdpleaser | Hacker News Reader

"Just following orders" was a valid excuse until the Nuremberg trials.

"Just following orders" has been used as recently as the Obama administration as an excuse not to prosecute CIA operatives for torture, despite American law on the books that explicitly forbids using it as an excuse for torture.

Isn't the main part that they were given legal guidance that what they were doing was not legally torture though? There's a bit in another article that got posted today [0] about that.

> Guantánamo leadership wanted to understand the legal gymnastics that would be required to implement a program of their own. “Torture has been prohibited by international law, but the language of the statutes is written vaguely,”

and

> Bush Administration lawyers had taken the position that “enemy combatants” could be held indefinitely, without trials, and that in order for something to qualify as “torture” it “must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.”

[0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/22/guantanamos-da...

People weren't just tortured, some were tortured to death.

The United States Senate ratified, and President Reagan signed the The U.N. Convention Against Torture, which states that “no exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.”

No amount of legal hand waving by the Bush administration can justify what was done.

Likewise, there is no excuse for the Obama administration refusing to prosecute the crimes that occurred.

Not arguing the moral point. The parent poster said the threshold of the treatment becoming torture wasn’t crossed, you are saying torture is banned by the agreement. It needs to be torture for you point to have standing

How can the treatment of prisoners prove to be fatal without that treatment rising to the level of torture?

As Obama put it, "We tortured some folks."

He just refused to prosecute those guilty of ordering and carrying out that torture, despite our treaty obligation to do so.

Perhaps Obama was "just following orders" himself.

It was rejected in 1474 - rather a long time before Nuremberg - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders#The_trial_of_P...

If read https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/789376.The_Nuremberg_Tri... I believe you will find this is not the case.

You don't think people were executed post-war for "just following orders" before the Nuremberg trials?

In other words, do you really think such people got off easy before the Nuremberg trials? If anything, much worse has happened to them throughout history, because the kings and dictators didn't have to put them through a judicial process.

Whether or not you're punished for following orders has more to do with whether or not you're on the side that writes history than anything else.

This is an embarrassment of the victor and never celebrated - atrocious actors on the victorious side have been punished at times throughout history but I agree the bar is higher. It certainly isn't celebrated though - and informed societies can still be outraged (See Guantanamo, Abu Gharib, Yemenese drone strikes under Obama & Trump, the Bay of Pigs, Guatemala... the general familiarity of this list is a testament to the fact that the victor can be held accountable - even if individual actors are generally given more levity[1]...)

[1] _sigh_ Oliver North, honestly America... why did you never... eh.

Depends on the situation. Let's say you have a hostile war captive (enemy combative of a high rank) who is the ONLY one who can provide you with critical, war-winning details. You (metaphorically) would want to do whatever it took to secure those details. I've been in hairy situations before. Everything Hollywood depicts goes out the window. Embedded reporters get a newfound respect for troops once they ride out just one hot encounter. They understand the need for the military to do what they do, and are likewise frustrated when the military's hands are needlessly tied when they shouldn't be. I agree to not engage in heinous acts for their own sake, but sometimes more vigorous actions are needed to win for the sake of innocent lives. Case in point being ISIS. They should have been afforded zero grace. In fact, my aforementioned situation has played out in the real many times over. Imagine if the man above had kidnapped a loved one. You would do and sanction anything necessary to get back your loved one. Failure to see this is a moral failure on the part of the one to make the right decisions. There are some situations where "anything goes" is the way to go. Thankfully they are few and far between.

You would want to do whatever it took to secure those details.

Right, so you bring in Hanns Scharff.

The problem with this kind of consequentialist ethics is that thinking the end justifies the means generally makes you very vulnerable to manipulation by others who tell you what the ends will be and then ask you to do the means.

Remember, Guantanamo also had taxi drivers and aid workers in it. How many of them are you willing to torture in order to find the terrorist you've captured and maybe get some information that might help stop a future terrorist plot? The hypothetical of capturing a top general with a tight deadline provides a terrible intuition when it comes to torture.

But that is exactly the kind of intuition Rumsfeld et al wanted people to be thinking about, in order to justify torture^W enhanced interrogation techniques.

You (metaphorically) still didn't answer the underlying question, namely, wouldn't you do anything it took to save a loved one? The answer isn't grey, it's black and white. The answer is always YES to doing what it takes to save one's family. You have a moral imperative to do whatever it takes to keep your own safe, up to, and including, your own life. You fail your family morally if you fail to act when you could do so. People like to throw in these trick questions like, "If you could save your own child, but nine others would die; or you could save the nine and your own would die. What would you choose?" Save my own child every time.

So, then you'd kill 6 billion to save your own child.

That is patently ridiculous and taken to the extreme and you know it. We are talking reasonable possible situations (not world events) that you may find yourself in. And yes, if I had a choice to save an entire building or just my kid, it's my kid every time. I fail them morally if I do not. I'm not responsible for other people's family, just my own. Now... if I could save my kid and everyone else, then yes. But my kid first.

Hardly ridiculous, it's inescapably implied by

> The answer isn't grey, it's black and white. The answer is always YES to doing what it takes to save one's family.

You didn't really need to make such an absolute point, but you did.

Of course they were. The key point is the Nuremberg trials are legal trials, supposedly fair and Geneva convention friendly way to punish the loosing side one Japan escaped

And it’s still valid if you haven’t lost a war because no one can make it valid.

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