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Comment by potatolicious | Hacker News Reader

I don't think the idea was to color the US government as "evil" - but rather that the criticism that these are "exceptions" is off base.

In all but one of the examples cited, this was acknowledged, deliberate policy of the government at many levels. Extraordinary rendition, imprisonment without charge, torture, drone strikes, all were known, approved of, and carried out with the assistance of many levels of the central government.

The only example there that can be reasonably cited as an aberration of the norm is the judge taking payoffs for heavy sentences - that's an example of one piece of the machine going rogue.

Sure, the US has done good during all this time as well, but the atrocities cited are not "exceptions", they are a core part of the American government of the past decade.

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US doesn't have the resources to give every one of the hundreds of thousands of individuals interested in blowing up a chunk of Americans a full blown 8 month trial, 3 hots and a cot, and loving handjobs twice per week.

As in all things in life there's a tradeoff between "justice" and "security". Luckily for you and most of the people in this thread, you get to benefit from the actions of people who have to make that call, while looking down on them from your moral high horse in your comfortably AC'ed parents' basement.

And who told you there are "hundreds of thousands" of people who want to blow up Americans?

But actually, even (very generously) at 100,000 brand-new prisoners for the USG to deal with it would certainly cope just fine (an increase of 4% on the current prison population). And imagine all the money which would be saved from surveillance programs if all the terrorists were dealt with!

The richest country in the world, by far, and you think we lack the resources to give fair trials and humane prison conditions to the people we accuse of crimes? You do know that innocent people get arrested sometimes, right?

> As in all things in life there's a tradeoff between "justice" and "security"

Some amount of tradeoff between freedom and security, I will grant you. But I can't see how strong security precludes us from actually bothering to properly investigate, try, and incarcerate people. That's just laziness, if not pure malice.

But you do have resources to start wars in name of XYZ, bomb other countries because of ZYX, etc? You really should know there are objective reasons why people from other countries can't stand US government/politics during last decade. If you don't understand what i'm talking about, that same politics is going after it's own citizens now, so you will find out soon.

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