Before Shooting in Iraq, a Warning on Blackwater | Hacker News Reader

Before Shooting in Iraq, a Warning on Blackwater

nytimes.com

41 pointsmrbabbage11 comments

From the article:

Mr. Carroll [Blackwater's lead in Iraq] said "that he could kill me at that very moment and no one could or would do anything about it as we were in Iraq," Mr. Richter [the State Department investigator] wrote in a memo to senior State Department officials in Washington.

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This was posted once and killed by user flags [1]. The bar for that is high—it's a strong and genuine community signal. It isn't reasonable to expect that signal to recur on every repost; that would amount to carte blanche for reposts. So it seems fair to treat reposts of flag-killed items as dupes, and we've demoted this post accordingly.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7964849

For those of us who feel that this article is important, and thus upvote this submission, make any difference then?

I hear you, but am not sure I have a good answer. There's simply no consensus about what belongs on the HN front page. It's a tug of war every day, and many users (on either side of any disagreement) feel bad when the content they favor doesn't prevail. It's good that people care, but it sucks that many are guaranteed to be disappointed. We don't seem to be able to eliminate that effect, only manage it and try to minimize it.

In the current case, it's important to realize that a post getting killed by user flags is a really strong signal. It's probably the strongest signal we get. That needs to count for something.

How many flags does it take to kill a story? How many did this story get?

Has our obsession with technology created this expectation of hiring "fire and forget" agencies that work like perfect little robots, do all the killing, and then leave no upsetting damage in their wake? I'm unsure about that myself, but when I see humans attempt to hire (on the one side) or act like (on the other side) humans that will supposedly behave just like computer software and only do what they are told, I really wonder what sort of things have established that expectation.

So Blackwater changed its name to Xi, then Academi, then merged with Triple Canopy to form Constellis Holdings. So people who are still mad at Blackwater might not realize that they should also be mad at Constellis.

I imagine they'll eventually change their name to "We love cute puppies".

That reminded me of the waterboarding demo on the news years back, where the torturers played popular music on the stereo while they administered the torture. Not sure if that's a real thing, but it made an uncomfortable news segment even more uncomfortable.

Actually, that's part of the torture: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/jun/19/usa.guantanamo

These documents have just now been disclosed. This is a huge scandal that should give us immense pause in considering future interventions in Iraq. I'm completely positive that we don't know the whole story, nor the full extent of the corruption involved. If private contractors are running the show for their own benefit, as seems likely from the circumstances of this fiasco, then we cannot trust our armed forces to give us recommendations on strategy for dealing with ISIS/The Islamic State.

It is amazing that a private, armed company with commercial interests is de facto giving orders to government officials and... the situation continues.

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