CIA black site detainee served as training prop to teach torture techniques
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Make no mistake, no US citizen outside of the political class benefits from this or other atrocities. The exact same goes for the surveillance programs.
Losing the moral high ground degrades the whole society.
The whole anti establishment movement rallies around stuff like this. The lefties and the right-wingers will be after different things but they will be able to come together on the hypocritical stance and corruption of the current system. It unites enemies against you who think that the most important thing is to bring down the current horrible governance and figure out things later.
Then when we get there and someone disappears (say, a colleague, a friend of a friend), some will think and even say "they must have done something". How do I know? Because that is what happened in Argentina during its Dirty War. Oh, I know, most of you will say "that could never happen in my country because we're a first-world Western nation", but Argentina very much was and still is a Western country, complete with rule of law ("Estado del Derecho"), and it was much wealthier then relative to the rest of the world, and had been truly first world in 1950. So, yes, these things very much can happen here in the U.S., and in Canada, and in the UK, and in France and Germany and Spain and Italy and Netherlands and Belgium and Norway and Sweden and so on.
It takes a very small number of men to do most of the torturing and killing domestically. Sure, lots more are needed to do the arresting (disappearing) of victims. But not very many need to get down and dirty. Just ten men killing 150 victims/year would have covered the majority of the killings in the Dirty War over six years.
Isn't that the exact opposite of disappearing?
I think the examples you're looking for are DHS hotel/detention centers [1] and Chicago's hidden detention centers [2].
[1]: https://abcnews.go.com/Business/marriott-choice-hotels-serve... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homan_Square_facility
Asking for a civilian to be tried for treason by a military tribunal for saying... the same things that a government official has said, but in a way that makes the government look bad, is the same thing as abandoning the rule of law.
We've only ever done such things during the Civil War, and even then Lincoln only suspended Habeas Corpus in limited places as needed. And Lincoln violated the Constitution in that case, as suspension of Habeas Corpus is, by its location in Article I of the U.S. Constitution, clearly only something Congress can do (though Article I, section 9(2), does not actually say so), and Chief Justice Taney correctly concluded as much in Ex Parte Merryman. (That said, I think Lincoln by and large did the right thing.)
Yes, we've had wartime restrictions on speech that sucked and were not constitutional and should not have been used at all, both in WWI and WWII. But we didn't treat such speech as Treason, nor did we have military tribunals for those speakers, nor did we suspend Habeas Corpus at any time other than during the Civil War. And those were declared wars. Trial of civilians by military tribunals is really only something you'd expect in a civil war, and only when the constitutional order has fallen apart.
But that's not disappearing. Assuming the tribunal found him guilty and gave him X punishment everybody would know (Obviously assuming the tribunal found him not guilty then he wouldn't be punished anyways).
Disappearing would be when your neighbor that always lets his goats chew all of your grass tells the cia that you're a terrorist so they come (and nobody else knows where you went) and get in the middle of the night so you won't keep chasing his goats away.
I live in the US now but I come from a third world country (Iran) where such atrocities are commonplace. And let me tell you. What is happening to Assange shows that when it matters, the intelligence community is above the law and not that different from those bizarre authoritarian regimes. It's just that their propaganda machine is just more successful at "spinning the stories" and making people believe Ed Snowden and Julian Assange are anything but heroes.
What gives me hope is:
a) McCarthyism (surely that was worse, yet we made it through)
b) this language is happening on privately funded cable news that approx 5% (I believe) of Americans watch on a daily basis. That's a far better place than coming from government officials.
These things not only „can happen“, they happened in the not too distant past - much less than a generation ago:
1. There is strong evidence that the CIA ran - and maybe still runs - black sites across Europe used to kidnap people and bring them to Afghanistan or Guantanamo for torture. 2. At least half of Germany used to be a socialist dictatorship until 1990. People disappeared on a regular basis - and those responsible for kidnapping, torturing and killing dissidents still live among us, as our neighbors, as businessmen or members of parliament.
> ASPA authorizes the President of the United States to use "all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release of any U.S. or allied personnel being detained or imprisoned by, on behalf of, or at the request of the International Criminal Court". This authorization has led the act to be nicknamed the "Hague Invasion Act".
> The act prohibits federal, state and local governments and agencies (including courts and law enforcement agencies) from assisting the International Criminal Court (ICC). For example, it prohibits the extradition of any person from the U.S. to the ICC; it also prohibits the transfer of classified national security information and law enforcement information to the ICC.
> The act also prohibits U.S. military aid to countries that are party to the ICC. However, exceptions are allowed for aid to NATO members, major non-NATO allies, Taiwan, and countries that have entered into "Article 98 agreements", agreeing not to hand over U.S. nationals to the ICC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Pr...
https://www.hrw.org/news/2002/08/03/us-hague-invasion-act-be...
edit after 7 upvotes, sorry: I just want to make clear that I still largely support Pax Americana, because the alternatives are worse. But this law is cowardly and actually works against US interests, just like torture.
Additionally, sovereign states are already free to prosecute anyone within their borders.
The ICC, however, would preempt US judicial authority — including the US Supreme Court.
The alternative of supernational courts dispensing justice at an international level is essentially loose federations of gangs doing the same thing.
And, when a kid in a crips neighborhood tries to join the bloods...
Doesn't seem to stop other countries from doing this internationally and to their own citizens anyway. Something like the ICC in how you're envisioning things can only work when it's backed by military force. So long story short, it is mainly just the U.S. enforcing things, which doesn't really change anything.
The bubble of people who post on HN have been living in that cloister for the last decade or so, not realizing what goes on in the world. At the end of the day, the US has made it a policy to defend and promote democracy across the world, and has actively done so, through it's support of international institutions and protection of democratic norms.
The subject of this article, that the United States government tortured was not so lucky.
Do the constitutional rights of a USA citizen need torture to maintain?
After 9/11, was anyone calling for diminishing US government powers? Maybe a few people, but for the most part - just the opposite - we wanted to hand even more power and money to the federal government.
[0] https://theintercept.com/2017/01/30/obama-killed-a-16-year-o...
Back then I’d ask my classmates to look at the other UN member countries not signatories to the Rome Statute subject to the ICC: China, Iraq, Israel, Libya, Qatar, and Yemen. Not exactly a list of countries championing human rights or state Sovereignty, the US included.
Absolute sovereignty is a very romantic notion, but the US gives up sovereignty regularly through other treaties, it is very telling the Rome Statute is where the US and others draw the line. If you are worried about violation of your US Constitutional Rights you should be significantly more concerned about the US government that in the last 20 years has created secret kills lists and conducted extra judicial killings of its own citizens including bombing citizens abroad in violation of the territorial integrity of other nations. When those charged with protecting and enforcing your Constitutional Rights are the ones violating them, I personally like the idea those bearing the most responsibility be subject to an International Court.
I don’t want to say your concern about being subject to the ICC as a civilian otherwise in contravention to your US Constitutional Rights isn’t worthy of discussion or potential concern, but it is detached from reality. Moreover, the ICC has jurisdiction over things like genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity it’s not exactly a “criminal court” the average citizen is likely to find themselves in violation of their Constitutional Rivhts (though perhaps you are not a civilian rather a high ranking military officer, in which case I understand your concern over an international court that prosecutes war crimes and human rights abuses).
That's far from a complete list. There are 193 UN members[1]; only 123 have made themselves subject to the ICC[2].
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Member_states_of_the_United_Na...
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/States_parties_to_the_Rome_Sta...
But I think the real issue is that the CIA doesn't want oversight from anyone foreign or domestic.
Which is nowadays commonly handwaved away as the "Embarrassing Trump episode of the US", like it was unprecedented and will never happen again.
But it wasn't Trump who put the responsible ASPA in place, that happened under Bush, and Obama never brought that up as something he disagreed with.
Which is the same dynamic with most of these laws that give more power to the US executive; Both parties keep expanding and enjoying them, it's not seen as a problem because each of them gets their turn to then make use of them.
[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-54003527
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-usa-icc-idUSKCN1QW1ZH
People now counter any claim like this with "that's whataboutism!". It's free reign to be be hypocritical I guess.
The fact that Blackwater exists doesn't make Wagner any less evil. Whataboutism is using one to shut down conversations about the other.
Besides a few anecdotes, how many torture debriefings have you read and then cross checked?
Unless you’re in the industry, how could you possibly think you have an informed opinion on methods of intelligence gathering?
While the myth about Tprture's (lack of) effectiveness persists?
The idea that being an "industry" insider is necessary to understand Human Psychology 101 is also misinformation.
These ideas come from the NSA, CIA, etc. It doesn't mean they're true. It doesn't mean we have to buy them.
The most famous is Mitchell Jessen and Associates, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Elmer_Mitchell#Work_as_a... , but it's not the only one. Margot Williams published articles about an airline company used to send people to black sites across the world.
In rouge states it is.
Just saying....
EDIT: On the subject of dictatorships and the UN, there's a brief but insightful essay I recently came across recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30687498
> So many member states are themselves dictatorships that engage in horrible human rights violations—and they stick together. The latter point is key: the worst countries are far more united in protecting human rights abuses than the democracies are in protecting human rights.
Why so? Perhaps for Iraq you've forgot about the fact that VP Cheney's former company made significant gains from that lie?
The idea that one side's lies and unjustified violence are better than the other side's is why the wars and hypocrisy continue.
Either we - the ones being served cake - call all BS or we don't. But ongoing mediocre excuses for mediocrity aren't working.
/rant
First of all, I'm advocating for American behavior to remain beyond reproach and I favor prosecuting the American officials who misled the American public in the case of the Iraq war.
That said, I heartily reject the binary categorization between unblemished and blemished countries because all countries fall into the latter group. Of course there are differences in the quantity and degree of lying and unjustified violence that your scheme glosses over--the idea that no country is better than say, Nazi Germany or Stalin's Russia or Maoist China serves only gives rhetorical cover to the worst offenders/offenses: "who is Canada to criticize Nazi Germany considering its track record of unjustified violence against its own native population?". This is the worst kind of race-to-the bottom rhetoric.
I don't understand what you are saying here. More than one group can commit war crimes.
So it is not true that it undermines “our” moral posture. That is just rethorical gymnastic.
I think the US militaries have insufficient controls to uncover and punish war crimes, and the “American Servicemembers Protection Act of 2002” is particularly disgracefull. I believe the US should do better.
That being said when Russian troops intentionally shell civilians that is a war crime.
One can be a hypocrite and also be correct. Either a nation is committing war crimes, or they aren't. Either it's morally justified to oppose war crimes, or it isn't. You can't argue that the US should be punished for war crimes without also arguing that the US and NATO are correct to oppose Russian war crimes.
Otherwise, the argument is that Russia should be allowed to commit war crimes because the US gets to, which is at best an extremely childish way of viewing the world, wholly separated from morality.
I mean the poster at the top of this thread immediately tries to make some justification…
> This is the kind of stuff that probably makes some people’s job down the pipe easier and at the same time undermines the Western civilization.
No! It’s just wrong! We should never do this to other human beings. Period. But you want a GOOD reason why not ?
Because the people you trained to torture abroad one day return home and get jobs like security outside the nightclub your teenage kids are going to. You’re literally training psychopaths which later get unleashed on the public at home.
Also we know torture doesn’t work for information gathering. It’s only useful as a tool of oppression. Which is why we’re actually using it.
But seriously. I can’t believe I need to make the case against torture. It’s just wrong.
"The new law authorizes the use of military force to liberate any American or citizen of a U.S.-allied country being held by the court, which is located in The Hague. This provision, dubbed the "Hague invasion clause," has caused a strong reaction from U.S. allies around the world, particularly in the Netherlands. "
"U.S.: 'Hague Invasion Act' Becomes Law"
https://www.hrw.org/news/2002/08/03/us-hague-invasion-act-be...
I agree that the cost of moral high ground is a great loss to the society as a whole. We may never be able to recover from this. Guantanamo Bay is part of normal conversation and barely raises an eyebrow. Without going into details, my boss's kid recently said his dad drone strikes people ( he does nothing of the sort ).
This is the new normal.
Every government ever had and will have this problem.
What we should try to achieve in our society is to limit the power given to individuals on other people and allow each member of society to be free of centralised coercion. Nobody should have a monopoly on violence and nobody should be able to forcefully collect taxes from people and then go and wage a war on foreign people.
You can call it being anti-establishment, I call it being morally consistent with the idea of freedom which is so often touted in the USA.
How does having "the moral high ground" help the lower class of a society?
I remember, I took part in a modeling competition trying to create a sustainability index for countries. During my analysis phase I realized that almost everything measurably bad you can think of correlated astoundingly well with the corruption index for that country. Even what seemed like very distant externalities.
It is echoes of the respect one human has for another.
That high ground also sets the standard for society. Some people will mock 'moral' leaders, but that leader sets the example for all. If that leader lowered their morals, the maximum, the example of what was possible, would also be lowered for all, to everyone's detriment.
Or, morality matters, we demand and mostly get the rule of law, and then we all benefit from not getting disappeared, tortured, killed.
It's very simple. Everyone needs the State to act morally. The "lower classes" need it even more than the "higher" classes! The poorer you are, the less protection you'll have from an immoral State.
Only in Marxist/Leninist fantasies do "the lower classes" benefit from not having a moral State: because the State will crush the "higher classes" for the benefit of the lower, yeah!!1! That's what always happens!! Not. That's very much not what happened in the USSR.
No, when the State foregoes morality, everyone suffers.
Because real moral does not just affect the rich? Also called being social.
You can expect further disruption, collapse of institutions, political or military coups etc and none of these are great for the low class people. As the establishment crumbles, a time for a new order will come and the left wing, the right wing, the QAnon and others will start fighting over the fix. Some will say eat the rich, others will say guns for everyone whoever wins takes it all and many will be concerned on what would lizard overlords do.
You're mistaking a prevailing attitude today for some "antiestablishment movement". You're right that a lack of moral compass is causing our society to degrade. But "the establishment" and "the barbarians" is essentially the same group - anyone with power or a platform today has learned to package themselves as against some "system" whenever it's convenient and things being bad, it's often convenient (plenty of "rogue CIA officers doing what "the system" won't do to defend America" types out there - they have had publicity with shows like "24" as well). Of course, the prevalence of and even admiration for, unprincipled chameleons is a way this society is degrading as well. But it's situation anyone would have trouble walking back.
There never was any moral high ground, the establishment were successful at making people FEEL as such. We are quick to point fingers at Nazis, Terrorists, Enemies yet the Western perspective is always 'we can do know wrong, if we did, its justified' which is exactly what the opposing side does.
Once a subtle reminder that many supported Nazi ideals early in America, even as Jews were being sent to gas chambers, companies like IBM were happy to do business with the regime, very much like they do with CCP companies as well as Putin.
There really is no way to change this without outside intervention, I will leave that to your imagination.
I understand what you're trying to say with respect to dirty hands, and not wilfully misunderstanding you.
But, wrong. There _was_ a moral high ground. It subsisted within the group of people you claim were duped. Those were and always will be the people who count, who hold the _normative_ values of a society. What they "feel" is American Values (more broadly "western ones").
The "establishment" you mention were the bad guys, and remain so. To the extent they spit on normative values then claims refuge in the necessity of dirty hands, they are unsoldierly and they play into the hands of the enemy who seeks to divide us and undermine our values. They may was well be KGB/FSB agents in our midst.
My point was try to see it from the people on the receiving end of pax Americana and tell me why the opposing sides reacted the way they have.
History is written by the victor and you simply don't get to hear from the losers. Therefore, there can be no absolute comparisons. You push somebody to poverty or vilify them, there is no exit but the desired outcome you seek. Once again, narratives is what shapes our reality, and the one that continuously virtue signals is the one that ultimately wins.
May I humbly give you links to some reading which I hope will benefit your views and arguments in the future. It pertains to a specific phrase I used above.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dirty-hands/
https://www.emerald.com/insight/publication/doi/10.1108/s152...
respects
This makes absolutely no sense unless you insert some unfounded premise of national/Western exceptionalism somewhere.
We can only try to make the State consist of institutions that keep it mostly moral. Doing so, and mostly succeeding, gives us the moral high ground even when there are some failures.
But when those institutions fail to keep the State mostly moral, watch out, because then we're in trouble.
And yet it is worth noting that the US government released this information under their own policies to the detriment of the "political class" and their own credibility worldwide. This is an important aspect of Democracies. I doubt you'd see the PRC releasing documents about the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region which will for sure be received as bad any time soon.
(This is not said to justify the acts in the article to be clear, but to point out a property of Democracies which is important)
I don’t know if I agree with that. I think folks underestimate how much conflict in interests “regular people” in different countries really have.
See, this specific situation has happened because a worker decided that their job will be accomplished easier this way. For the mass surveillance or denial of privacy for people is based exactly on the same idea: If they have access to people's communications they will spend less time and money to do their job in comparison to more involved traditional methods. I find it ridiculous that people are expected to be harmed or denied privacy in order to improve the efficiency in an institution.
Whether this torture business is right or wrong is not even part of the discussion, and might not even be relevant -- the whole point is that the angelic Western Civilization might be beset by the devilish "anti-establishment movement".
The point being about optics. Not about the suffering caused by torture.
> What's the point of everyone repeating how horrible torture is? I think that must be given.
It hasn't been obvious ever since the start of the War on Terror. At least not according to the Bush regime and people like Sam Harris or shows like 24. But me making that point might undermine the moral high ground of W. Civ.
PS: I have no involvement on the War on Terror, I don't agree that torture can be good under any conditions.
Can you please stop mischaracterising my post and explaining me what I said? Thank you.
The West has lost its brightness, its shine, its power of attraction (if one ignores the material thing), the reasons for that are numerous and I don't see any way to bring back the "end of history"-times (i.e. the complete dominance of the West when it comes to its cultural and societal influence) many were dreaming about in the 1990s.
The sheer wackiness of David Icke's Antisemitism (where 'reptile brains' are coda for Jews) never ceases to amaze me.
Many people call [the limbic system] the "Lizard Brain,” because the limbic system is about all a lizard has for brain function. It is in charge of fight, flight, feeding, fear, freezing up, and fornication.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/where-addiction-meet...
Given that we don’t have all, or even most, of the data, that’s really just emotionally driven speculation.
And maybe I’m being overly nuanced, but I’m beginning to accept that there’s a qualitative difference between distasteful treatment of dozens of people suspected of having information about terrorists, and the systematic persecution of entire populations.
I’m not terribly concerned that China, Russia, or anyone else is going to snatch and torture random nobody like me, and then justify it by pointing to CIA torture of Al Queda.
E.g. you have a virtual certainty that a dirty bomb is going to be detonated in NYC and will kill 1M+ and potentially irradiate the city for decades. Is torturing one person who you know with certainty knows the location of the bomb defensible?
Basically, how many lives would you be willing to sacrifice to prevent the suffering of a single person?
Yes, it's possible to concoct a fictional scenario whereby torturing one person saves millions of lives. Heck, why not a more plausible scenario where torturing someone saves 2 lives. But it's a non-sequitur: a true statement that is irrelevant.
I won't argue this well, especially not well enough to convince someone for whom "torture" is acceptable, but principles matter. It's the only thing that separates the good guys from the bad guys. Not guns, not good looks, not firm jaws, not money, not power, not magical spells. Bad and good people have, or don't have, those things in equal measure.
Torture = bad guy. Beating people in the street = bad guy. Planting evidence on a suspect = bad guy. Stealing elections = bad guy.
This is important because, while some of those things might be expedient to get your desired outcome, it makes society worse. If you do that, you are the bad guy. Maybe the other guy is bad too, but you definitely are. Now when other people do it, you can't say shit. You did it. You could not come up with a better way. Society is now worse and more dangerous because of you. All the bad guys have reasons for doing bad things, but only good guys do the good things, even when it's not easy. Good people say "times are extraordinarily dangerous, so now more than ever we must fight to maintain our integrity and our values, and treat our opponents with due process and dignity, no matter how much we despise them"
We now have a society where torture is considered awful, but that is hard won. Not long ago, we would burn people alive publicly as punishment for Very Serious reasons. When we start saying "torture is ok now because these times are extraordinarily dangerous", then torture is a bit more acceptable when times are not so dangerous.
That's it. That's the argument.
The problem is that these quandaries are then used to justify shitty behavior in other circumstances. What percentage of cop beatings save lives versus total cop beatings? 0.2%? 0.02%? What's the point of your question? What does the knowledge that you will be beaten if a cop suspects you of a terrible crime do to your state of mind? To the safety of police officers? To society?
I'm concocting a situation that I would like you to consider. Answer, please, with just as much gravitas. Let us imagine a society where beating or harassing anyone is absolutely taboo. In this society, no one need ever worry about physical violence. A woman could walk naked from Chicago to California never once being harassed. An elderly man could walk anywhere carrying a fat wallet of cash without fear of physical violence.
There is the rare and occasional thief, however. Now, one of these thieves steals a car and leaves a child baking in the sun in much the circumstances you describe. Beating the thief is the only possible way to save the child from a grizzly, horrendous, agonizing death, screaming alone for her mother.
But, once done, the beating breaks that taboo. Those police officers are a bit more likely to use violence to get what they want. It's a bit contagious, too. Other people begin to use violence. Bear with me, here. Let's say, because that taboo is broken, 100 more people are beaten over the next decade, and 1 or 2 of them die from their injuries. None of them "deserve" it.
Would you say it was worth it, to beat the man to save the life of that child, knowing that 1 or 2 people die and 100 are beaten, directly because of that?
> Would you say the police did anything wrong?
Yes, obviously. At the very least, they very obviously broke a law. They should file charges against themselves. The legal system is not absolute and a court / jury can decide about extenuating circumstances.
I can think of few laws that don't allow me to construct some extremely hare-brained counterexample where it might be morally justified to break them.
I would say yes they were in the wrong. It was a bad choice even if its one I would likely make myself. Maybe the insistence that morality is strictly on a continuum from "good" to "bad" is part of the issue.
In theory since the case is so trivial they could be convicted and immediately given complete presidential pardon with clean record or whatever is the equivalent.
Or jury nullification can be used. There would be no way I as a juror would declare them guilty.
You attack the problem with the rule of law, not unleashing your justice system from the reins of lawful behavior whenever they internally deem it convenient.
Yes? They beat the man.
> In a 2014 paper published in the Social and Personality Psychology Compass, researchers criticized the use of the trolley problem, arguing, among other things, that the scenario it presents is too extreme and unconnected to real-life moral situations to be useful or educational.
I can't say, how I would react in a given situation. I don't know, if I could torture/kill one (or a few) for the survival (or a better chance of survival) of a larger group. Because in the end one would have to ask were to draw the line. From a strictly utilitarian point of view killing one person to secure the survival of two others is a net positive outcome. But it feels morally more than wrong.
Where to draw the line. 1 against 50? Against 1000?
Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" [1, 2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ones_Who_Walk_Away_from_Om...
[2] Full short story: https://learning.hccs.edu/faculty/emily.klotz/engl1302-6/rea...
Well of course all sorts of definitive truths feel unintuitive or wrong to humans, perhaps that's just a limitation of our brains. From this utilitarian pov the net positive outcome is the morally correct one.
Utilitarianism isn't a rational choice. What if - in my extreme example, one of the two surviving people would have been Hitler?
Or even less dramatic, still contrived: What if the person being killed would go on and invent a cure against cancer?
You can't predict the future and these contrived examples only show, that (probably) every theory/philosophy can be brought to its knees by going to its extreme conclusions. So how to quantify "value"? How do we calculate the consequences of our decisions? We can't imho.
Unfortunately, that has little practical impact.
I can construct a lot of scenarios where I build an amazing startup and become a billionaire seemingly overnight.
Tragically, my bank account balance always seems to ignore the brilliant scenarios my mind comes up with.
Honestly, outside of philosophy departments questions like this aren't terribly useful.
The problem with your question is that ignores the specific circumstances of this case - where there obviously was no dirty bomb, there was no "certainty", there were not one million lives at stake in some definite deterministic sense.
I disagree completely. The fact that you can construct such a scenario says something very important about it. That it is not totally morally indefensible and the discussion is not one about a binary choice but one about degree.
Basically do we have any examples of this sort of situation, where there was an imminent threat to life and people were saved due to torture?
Most evidence points the other direction.
> Finally, an exhaustive 2014 report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence analyzed millions of internal CIA documents related to the torture of terrorism suspects, concluding that “the CIA's use of its enhanced interrogation techniques was not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation from detainees.” It adds that “multiple CIA detainees fabricated information, resulting in faulty intelligence.” https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/we-rsquo-ve-known...
https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/publ...
In the made up scenario you could make a case that even if there is a low probability of torture working, the scale of lives saved would make it worth it. A 20% chance of saving 1M people is still net +200k lives.
Sure it is. But if torture was limited to only cases as clear-cut as the one you propose, it would be virtually non-existent.
For such rare, extreme cases, it's better to keep it illegal, and hope an interrogator will risk jail to save the million people (and possibly be freed by jury nullification), than (effectively) legalizing it, and have its use creep to anyone merely suspected of terrorism (as defined by, from the point of view of the torture victims, an invading force), by an organization unaccountable even to citizens of its own country.
Well I believe this is technically still the case in the US.
No. No, there is no such scenario. You can coerce the information out of someone who has the knowledge in other ways, if that is the problem, even though that problem never actually surfaces outside of bad TV show plots.
Torture is wrong. It does not work. It often, in fact, does the opposite of work. It debases our humanity, our civility, and society. It makes the world a worse place in so many ways, I find it sad that otherwise intelligent people are even pondering this.
No. Torture is not morally, legally, or ethically acceptable.
Riddle me that and you'll have answered your own question and hopefully had an epiphany along the way.
In these extreme edge cases the people on the ground can be expected to break the law and break out the thumb screws. After all if you're willing to torture someone your own freedom is presumably a relatively mild price to pay... right?
We could then hope that the citizens enforcing the legal system will recognize the correctness of their actions and let them off.
Legal torture exists because the powerful don't see themselves as answering to anyone.
It the same issue when the police and prosecutor know all facts with certainty. At this point you don't need a court, a judge or a jury. In an artificial system where everything is know with perfect certainty you don't even need police and prosecutors, just a method to punish the guilty. A legal system is only needed in order to determine who is guilty and who isn't, and this is unnecessary if we know already who is guilty.
We know with some uncertainty the murder rate each year, and from this we have some measurable number that a person might be murdered. But we also know that murders tend to occur in non-random ways. At what murder rate should we start to arrest people at random?
They are fun thoughts experiments, but as guides for real life they work about as good as extreme simulations which removes mass, gravity and air friction.
Exact same reasoning as "thou shalt not brutally beat epileptic children, to try to cure them by driving the demons out".
No matter what principals you hold I can come up with a scenario where you will violate them. It does not make you unprincipled.
States using torture is a long way down the hole. It is such a shame that a dynamic exciting creative society like the USA's has fallen so far. It would be possible for the country to be a beacon of hope and civilisation. Instead it has become just another in a long line of grubby corrupt super states.
Such a crying shame.
What you have to do is credibly threaten to torture or kill their family members and loved ones, to rape their children. This works. Are you a bad enough dude to rationalize that?
Probably many are, but for a person crazy enough to do such a horrible act such threats would also likely not work (either "nothing to lose" or "don't care about anything anymore").
As a society I think we can only try to avoid creating enough people who have "nothing to lose" or "don't care about anything anymore"... They're basically "cancer cells", once at least one survives long enough to "do it's thing" (recruit team, deploy destructive thing etc.), there's nothing you can do besides damage control, you don't "interrogate a cancer cell", they're either irrational, or have no rational reason to help you regardless of any threat or pain you apply.
But you're right, torture would only work for "regular criminals/terrorists" for which... one shouldn't need torture, threats and rewards for collaboration would be enough. But these "regular bad guys" would not do stupid s like mass attacks on "civilians".
Generally if you end up thinking you absolutely need actual torture you've already f up badly, you're seeing things wrong, and sooner or later s will hit the fan for you or your organization... it's more of a sign of incompetence!
War isn't crazy, and participating in attacks on [your country] doesn't mean that one is irrational or doesn't care about anyone in the world. Just because you are willing to give your own life for a cause doesn't mean you have nothing to lose.
The reason I say it works is because it actually works, and has been used by states many times, esp. in South America by US trained torturers, but also by plenty of others, like the Khmer Rouge. The point is credibility - and if somebody has planted a dirty bomb in some city, you can't credibly give them any reward for telling on themselves. You can promise things, but they will not believe you. If you're Pinochet, though, you can credibly threaten to have someone's children raped and murdered, because he did it all the time. He can credibly promise to do it even after the bomb goes off, and after you've been executed, because he's done it to others. He can have them brought to you and have it done in front of you.
The US also uses this tactic, although since it will never carry it out (although it will carry out deportations, indictments, etc. for family members) it relies on a lot of playacting. There are stories of the US pretending to torture family members within earshot of people being interrogated.
I mean, you're probably not torturing average-Joe working-in-an-office with 2.5 kids and a white fence house :)
Taking you apart for your organs can be used to save the lives of multiple people.
So, I'd say, in your case, three or four, tops.
I don't imagine that was the answer you were looking for.
Fixing terrorism by more surveillance, torture, less rights might delay the detonation of a dirty bomb but since the core issue remains nothing is solved.
Besides, there are very effective techniques against information extraction through torture, like dividing organisations into cells.
IMHO, if it comes to torture 1 person to save 1M+ people there's likely to be another person who you will fail to catch and that person will take down the 1M+. I don't believe that the scenario of torturing 1 person and saving 1M+ exists beyond games and movies.
After years of torture, dronning and gunning people, the US left Afghanistan and people were falling from the skies when trying to run away. Did you miss that? Why do you think that torture can be an effective tool?
I absolutely do not believe governments should be able to torture someone, for any reason, regardless of the consequences. It has less to do with the suffering of a single person, and more with the constant and consistent scope creep that enters every government program coupled with the ability for any and all governments to be full of faceless, and therefore blameless, bureaucrats.
Torture to save 1 million people today becomes torture to save 10 people tomorrow. If no one can be held accountable, then it becomes torture to stop a robbery instead of genocide.
If you let your morals slip once, you are an immoral society. Like it or lump it.
Edit to clarify: I am 100% anti-torture in any situation. I didn't think that needed clarification?
No this is nothing more but a sleazy attempt to whitewash a crime
I'm not sure how to re-word that to clarify.
-- Fyodor DostoevskyIt is a travesty and a tragedy, but morally, if I did my best within the bounds of the law, what else is there? If there is no rule of law, what's the purpose of the whole thing? If torture is negotiable, why not speeding? Why not kidnapping (which might be implied in the torture)? Why not eliminating the right to a fair trial (again, maybe that's implied)?
If I disassemble you and redistribute your body parts, I could save several people who are in dire need of a heart, some kidneys, some blood.
Should I just go ahead and do this? If not, why not?
Someone stole the car with the baby inside. Police caught the thief, but there is no car or the baby. There is a heatwave and the baby can last max 2h in the car. The thief panicked and dumped the car somewhere. He is not willing to tell where it is.
Beating him up to get the info is acceptable ethically.
edit: Americans (and others) have been taught to believe in torture like a religion, to continue to associate torture with truth. Torture is an argument; you're arguing with people that it's in their best interest to do what you want them to do. It is rarely an appropriate argument, and rarely an effective argument. It's far easier and more effective to convince them that cooperating with you is the right thing to do, and that's still not easy. But there are tactics, such as complete isolation and control over their environment, rewards for any sort of cooperation, friendliness and human connection, actual rhetoric and discussion, periods of complete disorientation alternated with periods of calm, pandering to their egos. They don't work in two hours.
They did, but it didn't work
> Life is not a hollywood action movie.
This is an example from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Which is pretty much all you need to know about torture.
When torture or "EIT" is used for a source of intelligence, using that sole point of data as proof is fraught with peril. Dropping JDAMs on a building fingered solely by a detainee is sure to get random bystanders killed. Running a raid, similarly, might well be a trap.
However, when one corroborates this with other sources of data, it is a "valid" technique. When one uses a piece of intelligence from a detainee as a starting point and further validates the veracity of the claim, it is a "valid" starting point.
This isn't to say whether or not this path counts as moral, just that the "torture doesn't work because lies" is itself dishonest.
https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-fg-torture-report-20141210...
It has also been recognized as such by many, many torturers.
People think torture works because they think that the guilty deserve it. In other words, they want to avenge.
Hence the never-ending rationalization of torture. People want the bad guys to suffer for what they have done.
A long torture represents the worse punishment possible. If the act is bad enough (like 9/11 or rape of a child), many people find it appropriate, and more so if they don't have to do it themselves.
The perpetrators of torture like it. They just need a narrative that justifies it, a narrative they believe in. In that case, quite a large part of us can become torturers if the circumstances put them in the situation.
Many people think that the average Joe would never torture, in any circumstances. It is just untrue. A human just need to be embedded in a group of people which values legitimate violence or torture.
If we have a social support to make it legitimate, most people can do terrible things.
Hence the mobs lynching a suspect - like that guy who was killed in Boston because an online mob pointed him as the perpetrator of the marathon bombs.
Hence the common soldiers of the German Wehrmacht on the eastern front, who participated in the killing of many Jews. The idea that only fanatic Nazis like the Waffen SS or the Einsatzgruppen were involved are just untrue. Many German - who have no issues recognizing their country's responsibilities and atrocities - still can't believe that the average soldier directly participated in the genocide. They did - as historians have demonstrated.
The genocide in Rwanda has also shown that. Most of Hutus' men participated in the genocide of the Tutsis, and most of women either supported it or acted in it.
In a given society in normal circumstances, there will always be people who want violence for itself. Efficiency to solve what the society consider punishable offers the perfect rationalization for their own need to be violent.
If you have an urge to be violent, one can become a cop or join a drug gang. Not that all cops are violent but many are. Many wives of cops or soldiers are beaten by their husband. Sorry to tell harsh truths.
But that can be different. The German police is nowadays known for its specific values. In France, were I live, cops are getting always more violent without any reason for it, just a slow radicalization to far-right ideas and values. More than 60% in the police force now vote for the far-right. This is known through their actual vote when they elect their unions' representatives.
Violence is the norm in most "force institutions" (police, army, intelligence services) in most countries, including democracies. Torture is merely the exacerbation of it in special circumstances where the crime is considered so bad that the uttermost violence is legitimized.
In average, during the XXth century, 90% of casualties during the war were civilians.
When fighting the Germans and the Japanese during WWII, the "good" countries like the USA and the UK went at length to use terror against the civilians - sharing with Hitler the idea that if the people is demoralized by intense bombings, it will force their military to stop the war. Dresden and Tokyo were both bombed with incendiary devices. In Dresden, 130 000 casualties during a sole night, 95% being civilians.
Humans are nor violent nor peaceful by nature. They are social animals who behave according to the current social norms of their social group.
Obama was a splendid President, very respectful of the Constitution - and I gladly voted for him. But he went along with the drone war in Afghanistan, with a large number of collateral casualties. Basically, 5 year-old children of djihadists can legitimately be killed if they happen to be nearby their father when a drone located him. Collateral damages, necessary for the greater good.
The Obamas have become very close to George Bush Jr. They can't stop saying how much a nice guy he is. Except that this guy should be trialed by the International Court of Justice if not by the American legal system for invading and occupying Iraq on fabricated grounds.
How can these super cultivated people and so decent people like the Obamas befriend GWBb Jr? Well, they have been in power as well and that experience has immerged them into the social norms of Washington. Very few are the one capable of keeping a true moral compass while embedded in a specific social class.
I'm no exception to this. I try to be a good guy but I identify myself as the guy in the Star Wars movie who wonders: Are we the baddies?
Like that ever stopped anyone. "Collateral damage" they call it.
Couldn't you say the same about the technique of having 10,000 monkeys hammer randomly on typewriters?
And if that doesn't happen, European companies will cancel American accounts, IKEA will close shop here, GOG will refuse to sell games in US, etc, etc. Right?
Because, as I've learned on HN in the last two weeks, all citizens are responsible for what their government is doing, regardless of their knowledge or level of support for the practice.
Yup. They absolutely are.
There is no way the US's long history of human right abuses would have gone on for so long if the american people weren't fundamentally okay with it.
Doesn't mean anything will be done about it.
You don't ever see anything about the invasions of Grenada or Panama, let alone all the murk that the US does with Haiti, heck Puerto Rico is not even a state but a US Caribbean colony, the US used to torture the separatists leaders of Puerto Rico with Radiation
https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/50-years-since-Death-of-...
I am posting telesur purposely btw, if anyone else cares go read the wiki
Many of you reading this have coworkers who share a cap table with this organization.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30628667
Those of you who work at Amazon, your employer built and operates a special custom, airgapped datacenter at Langley for this organization. When you write library code that makes AWS services better, you also enrich this organization and make them more effective at carrying out these types of operations (like actively hacking into the computers in the US Congress that were used by the congresspeople who provide oversight to the CIA, to delete evidence of torture, getting caught doing the hacking and evidence tampering, and subsequently lying to Congress about the hacking).
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/the-d...
This is a safe space for rationalisation, we can't let 'the feels' creep in and threaten that.
Also it would be way too 'political' if we assigned a moral valence to torture, and political discussions are discouraged here.
It is loosing the civilisation plot.
Such an odd cross section of libertarian "freedom above all else" people and legitimately smart technical folks.
I like the technical part, the "this is binary and I believe in freedom above all else" cohort turns me off pretty hard though.
I am sorry, what "outcomes"?
Only outcome I see here is the hegemony of the planet abusing brown people simply because it suspected that they could have been dangerous at some point in the past so it tortures them to try and prove how "dangerous" they truly where, but ofc bc torture doesn't even work these poor sods end up with all sorts of health problems or brain damage in this case, and the cia ends up with a notebook full of lies, extracted under torture with which they will use to bomb the shit outta more poor brown people elsewhere
Yeah... "outcomes"
> “Ammar fabricated the information he provided when undergoing EITs,” it said. “He later admitted to his interrogators/debriefers that he was terrified and lied to get agency officers to stop the measures … Ammar also explained that he was afraid to tell a lie and was afraid to tell the truth because he did not know how either would be received.”
Randroids probably.
Ayn Rand is piss poor literature, and even worse as philosophy or life advice.
Glancing through the comments now, I see only maybe one or two that don't overtly and somewhat emotionally condemn this. And those one or two that don't aren't praising it by any means either.
Instead, they get cushy think tank and consultancy jobs as a reward for their evil 'service'.
That might finally make a dent in getting rid of capital punishment once and for all.
You can't fix violence with more violence, you have to fix violence with cleverness.
They are effectively a rogue criminal organization with the power of state protection at this point. Making an example of the criminal acts we do have knowledge of seems the only effective recourse short of dismantling the CIA entirely.
If enough people shout about the emperor's nakedness enough times, eventually it will jump the gap from something everyone knows, to common knowledge[1] (something everyone knows that everyone knows). They will have to fall into disrepute, and that won't happen by us being quiet about it.
Right now, I think most people in the US think of the US as a place with the rule of law, and equal application thereof. The CIA's well-documented activities illustrate plainly that that is not true. The well-publicized summary executions of unarmed people by the police without trial or jury are getting noticed more often, as well. We can say it in plain words, often, to bring it to the level of common sense.
The vast, vast majority of people would like to live in a place with the rule of law, applied fairly and equally to all people. An even higher percentage would be on board without the rule of law, just so long as no special connected elites get unique treatment and free taxpayer money. This is a big tent.
There will, of course, be a subset of the population at all times that wants gun-toting, black-bag Jack Bauer 007 "license to kill" daddy to run around and exercise their best super reliable adult judgement and eschew the entire time-consuming nonsense of arrest and human rights and trial and just put a blowtorch to the balls of the Completely Obviously Guilty Bad Terrorist Guy immediately, as we have immortalized in so much of our entertainment. But I remain resolute in my belief that those people are a small minority of human beings, and are shrinking every generation. There isn't a month of my life that goes by that I am not beaming proud of the human race that we even gave the fucking nazis full on courtroom trials after WW2. If that doesn't show that we can absolutely get there on a long enough timescale, I don't know what does.
The usual tropes apply:
- sunlight is the best disinfectant
- teach, listen, learn
- treat others as you wish to be treated
- always stand up for the truth
We've been improving for thousands of years. In another few we'll get there yet.
[1]: https://www.epsilontheory.com/inflation-and-the-common-knowl... https://www.epsilontheory.com/sheep-logic/
10% of the population needs to call for the execution of all torturers in the CIA before the zeitgeist's illusion of justice painted over black ops can be dismantled. If radicals only advocated for "CIA is bad and needs to be reigned in" that doesn't create enough cognitive dissonance for the general public to reflect on their attitudes and actually effect change.
Radicals advocating for the superlative solution create cover for moderates to take compromise action.
I think it would be good for society if CIA torturers would be executed, but I'd be shocked if the moderate politicians in power had the courage to actually do so.
In addition to being barbaric, it also has the tiny problem of being ineffective. You can't execute an ideology, you have to out-meme it.
The concept of an above-the-law class has a long and beloved history because us social human beings seem to really love (and require!) having a very clear and well-defined social hierarchy within which one can orient oneself. Most of us would even prefer clarity about the hierarchy and where one resides within it to elevated position within a murkier hierarchy.
You can't get rid of a monarch just by stripping them of their power and installing a parliament; the poor will keep polishing their crowns and spoons for free until the cows come home. You literally have to construct a better meme to replace the fundamental concept. You'll have to out-James Bond James Bond (and Batman and Superman and Jack Bauer and Jason Bourne and friends).
I used to think that the US constitution was an explicitly fraudulent meme promoted by the ruling class (I think Washington was the largest landowner in the colonies?) to usurp, and maybe it was, but this Lincoln quote made me think a little more deeply about it:
> As a nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' We now practically read it 'all men are created equal, except negroes.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.' When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty – to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.
Even Lincoln pointed out we were full of shit. I suppose he's right that it's better to fake it 'till you make it than to not give a shit at all.
I think 'never advocate for violence, even against more-violent greater evils' is a flawed rule because it leads to the compromise result landed closer to in favor of evil. We need the radical voices to drag the center towards effective action. (And torture is so superlatively evil that I have no moral qualms advocating for the humane execution of those who can be proven to have engaged in or ordered it).
Steady! We must not become our enemy. We achieve peace and justice through peaceful and just means, or not at all!
The idea that we are 'above' them is only possible because propaganda and secrecy keeps the horrors of what our country does out of the zeitgeist.
As long as former torturers get to be pundits on TV talk shows, I see no path to fixing this. We need someone courageous and with power to start enforcing the existing laws against these people to the maximum or the problem is only going to get worse.
That’s exactly what your alleged enemy thinks.
The people who can do these things need to be locked away for the good of mankind. Start from the top.
Precisely.
I think if the US wants to be a global hegemon without having a bankrupt/hypocritical liberal ideology, a good way to start would be with locking up Bush, Cheney, and the rest of the neocons responsible for the Iraq War for a life sentence. Obama, Clinton and the rest of the administration officials responsible for Libya, Syria, and the drone assassination program.
We don't even need to go that far back to prosecute all living presidents (even though in a just world, we would), but this would be a good start. Anything less means that US participation in international institutions like ICJ is just a farce (like how Saudi Arabia has a seat on the UN HRC)
I _hate_ the feeling of the smacking the back of my head. And they did it, against a plywood wall, by gripping a towel wrapped around his neck and slamming him into it, for two hours at a time, just to 'train' people.
Everyone involved - perpetrators and victims - needs therapy and rehabilitation.
The assailants need to sit down and apologize to this guy if they are ever going to be healthy humans again.
Because we are not like them. We believe in peace, love, and human dignity.
That and the fact the US state has more military power than the rest of the world combined.....
This is a ridiculous thing to say. I mean, what are you proposing? The whole world sanction the US?
> This is a ridiculous thing to say. I mean, what are you proposing? The whole world sanction the US?
That would be a good start
The use cases of a single government having domain over such a large land mass, when 50 smaller states are already defined and functioning, are dwindling amidst the information age.
The crimes described in this article are utterly intolerable. Nobody wants this.
Torture and atrocities asside, I'd imagine most organized crime syndicates run tighter ships (eg. the standard dissolve the bodies of torture victims + kill the "torture service providers" too at regular intervals then re-recruit new ones etc.) ...this seem so beyond sloppy it's clearly a political s throwing play.
The difference is the CIA doesn't care about making money. They're secret police gone wild. They have no financial, legal or moral constraints, and the results were wholly predictable.
Often what we see, in the military machine is ugly. No surprise.
It is not that the American military are worse, the problem is they are more powerful.
(As I have commented elsewhere here) It is possible for the Americans to be a beacon of light in a dark world. It is a choice for them.
They have chosen the path of darkness. Such a waste
Well, nothing except:
1 - make lots of enemies
2 - make the world a more dangerous place
3 - lose the moral high ground and the respect of people/countries who might have otherwise been friends
These things have consequences... measured in American lives (which are, sadly, the only kind of lives some people care about)... but also in many other lives.
That's not exaggeration. Those are the stakes America is fucking around with by provoking the world like this and spooking the shit out of everyone.
Power corrupts.
If we have learned anything from the past 2 years, its not even all American lives. Some American lives are treated with utmost care while others barely register a blip on their radar.
Repressive regimes often make a point of persecuting family members. It sends the message that resistance will cause terrible things to happen to those you love, not just you. The torture works toward that end in this case.
Now that we've got a real honest-to-goodness war (with associated war crimes) happening in the only region of this planet that seemed at present to have a snowball's chance in hell of actually maintaining peace and human rights, I'm beginning to wonder if large groups of humans are even capable of actually having, you know, a civilization.
It's not lookin' good. I will remain pathologically optimistic, however.
Long term: a broader separation of US and EU interest, EU does not benefit from many of the US imperial policies, it actually loses on many of them.
Perhaps we should move intelligence work back under the domain of the military, how it was before 1941. We could put the marines in charge of the CIA’s mission, that mission being expeditionary intelligence (and not torturing people on black sites).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_...
Can we not use the euphemisms?
The ongoing Assange case comes to mind. A farce if i've ever seen one.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/oct/06/cia-torture-...
Congress sets the annual federal budget. The Democrat controlled Congress literally allocated dollars to run that facility. If Democrats actually wanted to close it they could have eliminated funding, but they specifically chose to keep it multiple times.
Seems like he didn't really have anything to lose, so why not just do it?
Trump did way more extreme things with impunity.
I don't think the CIA would need to or even be able to blackmail a sitting president. They are too busy being his second most powerful tool. Like a really good hunting dog. It doesn't matter if it bites some peasants so long as he does a good job for its master.
CIA: If you don’t let us torture people just because then we’ll make a scandal of you.
President: Oh no. I guess I have to let you. I have no power whatsoever. Can’t get the FBI on it, because they’re blackmailing me too!
The US government and intelligence agencies is not like what you see in the movies.
Jeffrey Epstein. Do you think it was coincidence that he had power of attorney over Les Wexner, who was involved with the notorious Southern Air Transport? There are many other intelligence connections, for instance Maxwell and her father.
The CIA is really the worst institution in the US government.
I'm not sure how a scandal during one presidency is comparable in your example to scandals that happened before a presidency. Further, you might recall that there was a 'strategic strike' attack in Africa as well as a contentious immigration ban in the first weeks of the Trump presidency, which, if I am following your logic, would actually suggest an attempt to distract from unsavory past deeds.
(Perhaps there is another cynical explanation for the Africa thing but it is probably not to distract from an, as you say, decades-old scandal.)
There are tons of competing military intelligence organizations that would be happy to take over from there. The CIA as we know it would cease to exist in a matter of days.
What a shame.
Indifference to Reality - All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. ... Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage – torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians – which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side.
Awful. I kind of wonder if this ignorance extends to training their own field agents at The Farm where they do mock torture. Unlike Hollywood, taking a few blows to the head tends to be deleterious rather than toughening one up. Potentially even disabling or fatal.
Yet they decided to use him as a training dummy anyway, why? Because the cia is just fucking evil and it ought have been disbanded in the 1960s with JFK
Anyhow, what I just wish is that more world powers had their own CIAs and dedicated themselves to hunt down and kill US cia agents as needed to defend their national sovereignty and population
The US doesn't understand anything but violence, I just wish there were more tools to deter the US from using it, forcing it to a dialogue table, terrorist country.