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Comment by enraged_camel | Hacker News Reader

You must be living in some sort of alternate reality dreamstate where these things don't happen routinely. Allow me to attempt to wake you up:

Eternal NSA surveillance. The TSA. No-fly lists. Secret prisons. Guantanamo Bay. Election rigging. Being targeted by IRS. The percentage of population that is in prison (much higher than USSR at the height of its power).

I could go on. Out of everything you stated, the only thing we don't have is mass executions of political prisoners. But the fact is, the differences between the USA and USSR are only on a matter of scale. And that scale is growing at an alarming rate.

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Secret prisons. Guantanamo Bay.

As someone born in the 70s it's ironic to think that we now talk about "sending people to Gitmo" the way we used to joke as kids about people being "sent to Siberia" back when Russia was the bad guy. Funny how much things can change in your own country.

"But the fact is, the differences between the USA and USSR are only on a matter of scale."

I can still buy bread, reliably, at a corner market. I can still open a business on a whim without too much fear of bureaucrats making my life completely miserable. I don't have to worry about leaving the country.

There are very real issues with the United States, but this kind of rubbish comparison does nothing to help spur the debate onwards in a useful fashion.

"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." - Mark Twain

Historical comparisons are tricky. I remember reading numerous comparisons of Bush to Hitler in 2003. On the one hand, such talk is both absurd and offensive. On the other, certain detailed similarities were extremely accurate, such as Goebbels' infamous quote about denouncing pacifists for lack of patriotism.

Nothing ever repeats exactly, and empires least of all. The best lesson that can be drawn from the history of powerful states is that they learn from one another, carrying forward the "best practices" based on what did and didn't work.

Has the U.S. become Nazi Germany, or Stalinist Russia, or even modern China? Not even close, by any metric. But have we engaged in human rights abuses analogous to other actions by those three? Undisputedly. The fact that we do so on a smaller scale and with more effective P.R. does little to help the victims.

Where are the secret prisons, anyway?

Almost all of them are overseas, outside of US territory and jurisdiction.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_site#Suspected_black_site...

Didn't you hear of these suspected terrorists sent by the CIA to Morocco, Syria or elsewhere explicitly to be tortured?

Nope.

So if I stick my head in the sand, and refuse to believe any of these things exist, does that mean they magically disappear?

It's unfortunate if you've managed to avoid the news for the last decade. The secret prisons the US has been running around the world have been regularly in the news since not long after 9/11.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maher_Arar

Also, why are they still considered "secret" if random people on HN are discussing them candidly?

Because their locations are or were undisclosed, and obviously not even everyone here has heard of them. They exist.

Edited in reply They are explicitly said to exist in Hollywood propaganda film Zero Dark Thirty (2013). No, this is not proof, although it is evidence. If the establishment wants us to believe they exist, is that not troubling enough?

FYI hollywood propaganda films aren't usually the best citations...

EDIT: spelling counts...

the fact that the movie made a splash within the security community for "saying too much" helps to give credence, as well.

Yeah, it's a movie, but the people who were upset about it being released were people in authority.

With Hollywood's ties to the US Government, it was probably a fake attempt to get their buddys' movie to sell better...

who knows. theories abound.

For the same reason the Gestapo were the official secrete police of the Nazi Germany. Abbreviation of Geheime Staatspolizei, "Secret State Police"

Or the US Secret Service...

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