But this should absolutely result in jail time. This is literally no different from if the managers of the company physically snuck into trainyards and snipped wires and removed valves or whatever.
It's literally just sabotage. It's a crime that should result in years of jail time for everyone in management who participated in this decision.
I feel a good enough prosecutor could pin charges of treason here.
If you're crippling infrastructure then you are inherently then you're most certainly aiding adversaries. You cannot fight an adversary if you cannot get goods moved.
If you're scamming the government out of money then you are inherently aiding adversaries. You cannot fight an adversary if you are penniless.
It sounds very comparable to me.
>If you're scamming the government out of money then you are inherently aiding adversaries. You cannot fight an adversary if you are penniless.
But if you apply this argument it quickly becomes a slippery slope. Running a fraud ring? You're depriving the security services of resources that could have been spent catching spies. Treason. Tax evasion? You're depriving the state of resources. Treason. Jaywalking? Believe it or not, treason. M̶a̶k̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶m̶o̶n̶e̶y̶ profiteering as a government contractor? Dunno man, sounds like you're a c̶o̶u̶n̶t̶e̶r̶r̶e̶v̶o̶l̶u̶t̶i̶o̶n̶a̶r̶y̶ traitor by making the government "penniless".
I don't really get your argument. In this case they're intentionally crippling a capability of the Polish state. There does not appear to be any particular intended beneficiary (other than themselves), but any and all enemies of the Polish state foreseeably benefit when the Polish state's abilities are curtailed.
Furthermore, the general understanding of treason does not require aiding a known adversary - it requires attacking, injuring, or otherwise betraying whoever has authority over you.
> I'm disturbed by the trend of calling anything vaguely against the national interest as "treason".
I guess what I'm saying here is that this involves something that is contrary to the national interest in very specific ways. The connection is not vague.
If I'm an American and I arrange to kidnap Joe Biden and hold him for ransom, does that sound like "treason" to you? All I want is money. But someone might think there's an important difference between the effect I'm trying to produce and the effect I actually do produce.
No, because those crimes typically get prosecuted as terrorism, not treason. Even leaking state secrets rarely get prosecuted as espionage rather than treason.
I'm not sure how you read what I wrote, and rounded that off to "an ideological belief that nothing must ever be called treason, regardless of what happened". I don't have a ready definition for you to examine, but based on the examples it's pretty clear that executive and/or judiciary don't share such an expansive definition of treason as you. Moreover, aren't you engaging in the opposite? Is any crime that's vaguely against the state "treason"? [see my comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38540252]
If another state did exactly the same thing, it would be an act of war. Is that not enough to make it treason when done by a subject of the state?
> I'm not sure how you read what I wrote, and rounded that off to "an ideological belief that nothing must ever be called treason, regardless of what happened".
Because what you wrote was "this can't be treason, because even things that are definitely treason still aren't treason". Take a look:
>>> those crimes typically get prosecuted as terrorism, not treason. Even leaking state secrets rarely get prosecuted as espionage rather than treason.
[I assume you meant to say "treason rather than espionage".]
This attitude is rare. Much more common is wanting to send them to jail for deliberately breaking the law -- or presiding over widespread flouting of the law by other management. E.g. The Wells Fargo cross selling scandal created literally millions of fraudulent accounts, and nobody went to jail.
"presiding over widespread flouting of the law" isn't a crime though, and it's difficult to make that a crime without running into due process issues (eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens_rea)
The implication of running a company is that you're charge. Obviously you can't control every employee so one offs are fine, but at a certain level of widespreadness it becomes a matter of, well, gross negligence.