Prosecute Torturers and Their Bosses
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
My hope is that those people that we don't see or hear about that work around injustices like these are doing what they can to keep some sort of balance. I try to convince myself sometimes that these people that love their country and want to do good are trying to use what power they have to make things right. I know for a fact that there are amazing people working in government and I hope the good stuff these people do just doesn't get much attention.
I love my country, I served, I consider myself a patriot, but I worry about my children and their children. I don't expect much, if anything, to come of this and the fact that that feeling is common for me as an American puts knots in my stomach.
It's a special kind of hell to live in the city where all this is taking place - where the local news IS what is going on in Congress (good and bad) - and not even be able to write to a voting representative in either house.
Of course I have to add, that first it would make much more sense to try to change the local sentiment first - usually done by enganging in your locale community.
In the USCIA, it's no longer possible to engage with your local community without being cognizant of government spies. After all that happened with the Occupy movement, if the criminals who oversaw these sadistic acts of torture aren't brought to justice, and it instead comes down to grassroots activism, I for one wouldn't count on justice.
And here's to hoping that I can at least continue to speak frankly on the internet. I certainly foresee my use of Tor creating problems for me down the road. It's why I'm such a big fan of Bitcoin, because that's the only viable way I'm aware of to defund these psychopaths.
This includes other countries.
Then there can be the constitutionally mandated federal district, that consists simply of the federal buildings, and everywhere that people live (outside of the White House, Number One Observatory Circle, and maybe a few other formal federal residences) would actually be within state jurisdiction.
This already happened to the bulk of the Virginia side of DC in 1847 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_retrocess...). I don't see why they don't just do that again with the rest.
If that doesn't work, it doesn't really matter that much if you sweep up a few commercial buildings into DC. Most of those federal buildings are mixed in with retail, hotels, convention centers, offices, and the like, which doesn't cause disenfranchisement if you include them within DC. The big problem is residential areas.
If you declared all federal buildings to be part of the district (and everything else Maryland) it would get messy fast:
+ What about commercial buildings that the feds lease? (There are many of these.)
+ What about federal buildings which are leased to commercial organizations? (Not sure if there are any, but it wouldn't surprise me.)
+ Would federal DC have its own first responders specifically to service federal buildings?
+ Would DC pay Maryland taxes for road maintenance between its "islands" of office space?
Etc.
Once you walked off the sidewalk, or off the third floor elevators, or through that door, etc, you would be on "federal turf" so to speak. It's not about a geographical circle.
The core national mall area is already protected by US Park Police, it would be possible to create a core DC area as a national park and return the rest of all land to the states. Federal buildings on land returned to the states would be treated like any other federal building in a state. There are plenty of federal buildings in NoVa and Maryland already.
The apathy about this issue is what confuses me - what harm would it do to allow DC residents to vote? What reason could you have to oppose DC citizens gaining the right to vote? The argument that federal government workers should be forbidden from voting is incredibly hollow - the vast majority of them reside outside the city. Also, this is tantamount to saying "Park Rangers in Idaho shouldn't be allowed to vote," a position I have never heard put forward.
I'm not against letting DC vote to fix the problem at this point. But this situation is ridiculous. There was no reason to start a major city in the no-voting zone.
Personally, I have no problem with adding DC as another state.
Politically, it'll never happen (imho). why would any senator give up 2% of their power to add 2 more senators? There are probably many issues blocking, but on that one at least is a monster to overcome.
No new senators would be created, so no yielding 2% power, and Maryland and Virginia might get 1-2 more electoral votes and/or congressional representatives.
I would imagine that the main issue that would need to be resolved is jurisdictional...would laws passed in Maryland and Virginia apply to residents of DC? If so, it's conceivable that those states could influence Federal policy. What would happen if one of those states made it illegal to order a drone strike without the approval from one of their courts...could the President be arrested and charged in that state for violating that law?
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_retrocessi...
Probably not, because Supremacy Clause. Federal officers operate in the states fairly regularly, and this general issue (not the specific issue involving the President and drone strikes in particular) has been litigated extensively.
See Coleman v. Maryland, holding that since the medical leave act provisions under the Family and Medical Leave Act were passed under the commerce clause, not the EPC, then state governments were not bound to it.
Presumably for reasons similar to ones that lead previous Congresses to add the previous 37 states to the Union, despite even higher dilution of power.
That sounds like a decent reason. Not compelling, but decent. It only needs to be enough to counter the anti-dilution argument, after all.
Puerto Rico's statehood is more likely though. In the 2012 election both Obama and Romney indicated support for statehood should that be what the people of PR decide. That's complicated because apparently the Republican Party of PR is the statehood party, even though PR is likely to vote for the Democratic Party. (See http://www.caribbeanbusinesspr.com/news/dc-lobbyist-warning-... )
So, D's control the House and Senate, DC and PR become states, and the D's pick up about 10 seats and hold power even longer. That's more compelling than DC alone.
I think the issue is more why would any republican senator vote for it, since DC is extremely liberal and would be confirmed Democratic bastions
Aren't rising house prices also a problem?
By contrast, people who don't live in DC didn't have their pay cut 10% by mandatory furloughs demanded by a governing body they have no vote in. People who don't live in DC get to pass laws determining how they want to live, without those laws being vetoed by representatives from Oklahoma who find them politically inconvenient in their home state.
I haven't even touched on the fact that DC's population is over 50% black, and has been for decades. It may not be the case now, but in the past the arguments for refusing DC residents the right to vote were very explicitly racial.
(Please tell me it wasn't because someone thought I was including dangerlibrary in those hundreds of thousands. That's a distinction that really doesn't matter, and I didn't want to double the size of the post with a disclaimer.)
I'd be the last to defend corruption, but it's important to point out that these things are relative. A republic can tolerate a little graft and profiteering. It cannot tolerate torture.
She's a lying sack of garbage. Maybe, just maybe she had an attack of conscience about the CIA thing -- my guess is that she realized it would make it out anyway, and decided it would be better to look good on that account than defend something obviously illegal.
Just watch. Nothing will happen.
I wonder who the next intelligence committee lapdog is going to be?
And she's great at doing just that: throwing the liberals a bone once in a rare while, which keeps them happy (no offense meant). She had no choice about releasing the report: she was going to get booted out of the SIC at the end of the year. If she didn't release the report (as was demanded by lots and lots of people), it would have been impossible to do so after January 1.
In any case: if she hadn't released it, Mark Udall would have, since he has nothing to lose.
This and the CIA never crucified, amputated, or executed men on film for progoganda...which is what we look at now on the news every other week.
Not to mention CIA's lethal drone program (incl. under Obama) has killed, maimed, and injured more innocent men/women/children than the EIA stuff.
please join others and continue fighting for the democracy you want to live in and that you want your children to live in. it's going to take all of us.
That's why we have to clean up this mess.
No, I disagree. I think the torturing itself and the moral failings it entails are a bigger problem than the (admittedly substantial) problem of reintegrating the individual torturers back into society.
(http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Killing:_The_Psychological..., http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killology)
The former you may be able to rehabilitate afterwards. The latter is Hannibal material.
Much like how lifeguards are taught that the first priority is making sure that they are safe rather than saving the person drowning.
If it were the top priority, very, very few attacks would take place. Taking that hill, destroying that gun, or gaining knowledge about enemy positions often gets higher priority than the lives of a few (or lots of. Generals knew lots of soldiers would die on D-Day, for instance) soldiers.
(I don't want to discuss much futher because of the downvotes, but the Five Why's can probably be utilized here.)
But Democrats won't sign on to something that will implicate Democratic party Presidents, nor will the GOP sign onto anything that will implicate a Republican president, no matter how despised he is by the Republican base.
The result is a lawless government and a strict reminder that there is no such thing as a "government of laws." In the end, all governments are "governments of men."
And that whitewash is not just to defend the national government, but to defend the parties.
I believe this is exactly the reason that the founders didn't want to have a party system. Some of their choices (like the original make up of the senate) I believe were specifically to prevent this.
Further, the entire goal of having strong state governments and a weak federal government was to prevent these kinds of crimes.
For the very reason that the federal government will not prosecute itself, a strong federal government is bad. (Principle agent problem.)
Can you imagine if states were doing extraordinary rendition and torture? Highly unlikely. While at the same time, for a real war, there would be no problem fighting with a bunch of state militias banding together (and it would cost us a lot less... much of our problem is due to the adventurism of our permanent military-- hard to justify keeping it around if you aren't constantly finding wars to start, er, fight.)
Why I read The "American Conservative," "Mother Jones," and "The Nation" more than I read The New York Times.
While I don't entirely disagree, I'd note that the control runs in both directions.
The only reason that corporate interests steer the government is that the government controls the corporations. By creating regulations that favor a company or the industry, they improve corporate returns. Even regulations that damage a company, but damage competitors worse, may enable rent-seeking and be a good long-term investment for a corporation.
So when the people, aghast at the kinds of problems they see, demand that the government must do something, and allow the government to gather more power in order to do so, this makes more power available for capture by the corporate interests, and so in the long run, makes the problem worse.
The decline of state versus federal power has been punctuated by events that arose because the states did far worse. There's slavery and the civil war, of course, but more recently state governments were throwing black Americans in jail or executing them with no evidence, turning a blind eye to lynchings and hangings and other atrocities. And every time the states proved that they could not be trusted, the Supreme Court gave the federal government a little more power over them.
Eisenhower sending federal troops (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a0/101...) into Arkansas to forcibly integrate a school would've been decried as a reprehensible infringement of state sovereignty if it wasn't so throughly justified.
The federal government, effectively, has been a party to the worst of these problems, by advocating for the last 150 years, that black folks "getting a job" will solve the issue. It never has and it never will. Give a man a fish and he'll be back tomorrow, which is why Sherman was more interested in giving them metaphorical fishing boats.
I have now lived in areas where there is a lot more racial separatism than there is in the US. In the absence of massive economic inequality, that poses very little problems. The problems in the US have been racial separatism backed by massive inequality out of the starting gate, something bolstered more than hindered by federal policy (though the states have been bad guys here too). But because we can pick and choose which bad guys we want to condemn, we can imagine that the feds messed up everything or that they saved people from the evil states. In reality there is plenty of blame to go around.
I like the Scandinavian model: most taxes go to the local level and most social programs are run at the local level. Sweden and Denmark, for example, have no national single payer systems (rather municipalities set up single payer systems). However on the spectrum of American politics that makes Scandinavians both far-left and far-far right....
Some people that fought in the civil war where alive in 1950, and your grandparents where likely to have met someone that fought in that war and or a former US slave.
We have had 2 descendants of slaves serving on our nation's highest court, a handful of Congressmen, and not much else. In terms of the legacy of slavery, you really can't count Obama.
No matter what the talking heads on the media say, I still think if you put Al Sharpton, Clarence Thomas, Jesse Jackson, and Ben Carson in a room and ask for consensus and ask them for suggestions to fix the race problem, they will come up with better answers faster than if you put Al Gore, Bill Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid in a room.
Given that, at the time, slaves were legally considered property, and not entirely people, I would have to respectfully disagree. You can't get much more powerless than being classified as livestock or furniture.
Yes, everything follows from the fact that slaves didn;t own productive property and then were forced into a wage labor system where they still didn't. But the narrative of racial progress I don't think follows the nice slope we'd like to think so we can pat ourselves on the back and say how far we've come.
The fact is, prison labor is a new form of slavery in its dimensions and the fact that it is increasingly for corporate profit. We are headed right back to where we were 150 years ago if we aren't careful.
But it's not that slaves were forced into a 'wage labor system' and didn't own property. Slaves were in many cases property. How can property "own" anything? Can the table in front of me own the things I put on it? Does a cow have any right to dispute being sent to the slaughterhouse? It would have been absurd to even consider in the South at the time.
No matter how exploitative the welfare and even prison systems are, it's still not in the same league. Although I would agree with you that prisons are about as close to slavery as we can probably get. But even then, everyone involved is legally 100% human in all 50 states.
> But it's not that slaves were forced into a 'wage labor system' and didn't own property.
Sorry, I was unclear. I am talking about the end of the Civil War and that the wage labor system was billed as the way forward for former slaves, instead of the land reform that Gen. Sherman and others pushed for.
> No matter how exploitative the welfare and even prison systems are, it's still not in the same league.
Define slavery for me. I think the best definition is when someone is compelled under force of law to labor for the profit of another. In this regard having prisoners work on jobs that generate profit for private companies, and penalizing those who refuse with longer sentences is slavery. There is no other real word for it. Additionally, as long as convicted felons are then exiled from the polity (unable to vote, discriminated against in private employment, etc), then you have something while, not as harsh as American slavery before the civil war, is quite a bit worse, in terms of denying whole demographics political and economic power, than Roman slavery was.
Now, now that no doubt we have thoroughly learned our lesson, certainly we'd never try or even want to do that again, gee, never, would we. I mean, we learned our lesson the first time, right? An identifiable laboring underclass, who would want that one again, right? We've been trying for 100+ years to get this pot to "melt", and we're still stirring, and stirring, and stirring.
Yes, this observation is not totally accurate and has several loose ends, and maybe we can get by with it this time, and hopefully with the orientals we got for the railroads and otherwise since we have, but, while I believe I see the intention, I can't be sure I can see the situation in another 50, oh, heck, 100, years.
However it comes out, and if we are going to do it, then I hope it does work out, I have to suspect that in some places the intentions are not good.
Or the joke goes, "The Republicans want the immigrants to work [laboring class] and not vote, and the Democrats want the immigrants to vote [underclass needing welfare] but not work [take jobs from the existing underclass].", not that I hear a lot of laughing. Ah, no one would think this way, right? And anyone who suggests such, call it, manipulative intentions can get some pejorative labels.
There's a cute Disney movie for children that has a song "Why Can't We Be Friends"; guess that song is a bit too advanced for much of the US power elite.
Trying to understand the United States and its history without knowing about the economics and social institutions of slavery is like trying to understand chemistry without knowing about atoms.
1. We learned our lesson, given how we rebuilt Taiwan, Japan, and Germany.
2. We haven't learned out lesson given how the same rhetoric is trotted out by both parties today.
I swear... "creating jobs" is the single worst goal in American politics. Any time you hear it watch closely: both parties use it as an excuse to give rich people more money nad chain people to corporate employment....
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jul/16/senate-derai...
The failure to deal with the slavery issue early on put us in this weird place... We're a people of paradox.
I sometimes find it useful to try to keep some kind of perspective with this kind of issue. Realistically all governments have issues policing themselves. I don't think this is unique to the US at all, nor does it represent some kind of break down of the US system of government.
But I don't see this as a states' rights issue directly. It is an issue with a large secret federal government (and stronger states or better yet, local governments, would make that less of an issue). But transferring power from the federal government to the states by itself has no impact at all except making the policies both affect fewer people and the government accountable to the fewer that are affected. That may be a win but it isn't by itself much of anything.
After all, it isn't like the FBI are the ones in the cross-hairs of the anti-police protests...
I'm not a big fan of Obama, but he's gotten an unfair shake on the national security front. The fact is that the broader electorate is indifferent about drone strikes and enhanced interrogation, but would pillory him if a terrorist attack happened "on his watch." If your theory of the world depends on Obama being duplicitous and going against the will of the people to do these things he promised he wouldn't do, I submit that it's not just republicans that may fairly be accused of ignoring reality when it comes to politics.
The issue isn't why won't the government do what we want it to do. The issue is: why do we still want revenge after 14 years, after Iraq and after Afghanistan?
No, that's the point of limited government in an otherwise democratic system.
The point of representative democratic government is to institute popular sovereignty while allowing most citizens to do something other than full-time government oversight.
This comes up in another point, which is marijuana legalisation. Under federal law, that stuff is still illegal, yet we've chosen not to prosecute. I'm still not sure of how the legality of the non-prosecution works out
Show me anal-rape-feeding on the big screen and ask me if I support it.
Your analogy is literally brain dead.
They are both moral issues, but other than that, they don't have much in common.
However, I will agree that if you made all people watch a video of an abortion, it would likely influence their opinion on it - but we don't cmsend the Cia all over the globe forcing abortions on people. Or kidnap people and send them to forced abortion clinics in Hungary.
1. To be clear I don't count myself as part of this group.
Your position begs the question of whether the drone policy is actually effective at reducing the risk of terror attacks. Many if not most critics of Obama's policy argue that they are in fact counterproductive in their stated mission.
It's sad that this isn't seen as an option anymore, but it should be. There are tons of offices out there that people have a reasonable chance at attaining and can kick start a political career. Not everyone will do a good job and not everyone should do it, but too many people don't even consider it as an option. The result is that the people in office tend to be people who are driven by ambition, lust for power, or desire for fame, precisely the least suitable people for office, with abundantly visible results.
This is to illustrate, that the perception of the country you live in largely depends on the indoctrination you received in your youth and the overall agenda. In most countries of Europe strong nationalistic tendencies are inconvenient for long term political goals, so the emphasis is on international cooperation and adherence to international law. In fact German politicians rarely state they "love their country" and would be crucified, if they described their country as "exceptional".
The US instead has been a rogue actor for much of its existence, basically ignores international law, routinely blocks inconvenient UN resolutions, has supported some of the most oppressive regimes in recent history (South Africa, Honduras, Egypt, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia come to mind) has constantly waged war and bullied countries in Middle and South America.
Restricted to foreign politics there is little America justifiably can be proud of in recent history and yet there is this whole quasi religion around the USA as a nation, "manifest destiny" etc., that apparently serves as a mental block even among many educated Americans to coolly and rationally evaluate the appalling record of most of their administrations in the past 50 years and maybe come to the conclusion that you should have persecuted many, who claimed they served your country and "loved it" a long time ago.
When that story came out of Chicago a few years ago about a two decade history of torturing inmates to get them to confess to crimes, we asked how that could go on for so long. Well, apparently you can torture powerless people of color in Chicago without consequence. They were only torturing "bad" people, weren't they?
I get ill listening to the "arguments" for torture. "Well, it works." I want to drop my head into my hands. The efficiency expert's answer to moral questions. But what about a ticking bomb? Can't Jack Bauer put a bullet in a prisoner's knee to get him to talk? The Israeli's have the process down: They torture supposedly because of a ticking bomb, a time limit, whatever, but then they take a break for the Sabath. Gotta keep those priorities in mind.
If torture "worked", does that mean we have no limits? Just animals ripping the face off our prey?
I'm not very religious. What are Christians thinking when they allow this to happen? Has the iron law of Paul taken over from the Prince of Peace? If there is one piece of evidence that the US is a post-Christian country, this is it.
The non-religious are the only group of which a majority opposes torture.
Select "Show results by: Race/Religion".
Notice how all the "religious" groups aren't defined by religion alone, but also by the qualifier "White". That's important, because if you go to the source [0], you see that the Race/Religion combination suggests the conclusion you describe because of its blend of race and religion together in some of its categories, but if you look at the Race breakdown, you see that Whites have large majority support for torture (66/25), while Non-Whites do not. Which makes the fact that the Race/Religion breakdown shows that the identified "religious" groups it breaks out all have majority support -- when those "religious" groups are White evangelical protestant (69/20), White non-evangelical Protestant (75/22), and White Catholic (66/23)-- somewhat less significant in religious terms than it seems at first.
[0] http://www.washingtonpost.com/page/2010-2019/WashingtonPost/...
I suspect that the explanation might be that not only are the non-White subsamples too small, but the racial composition of the various religious groups in the polls is (because of sample size issues) often not representative of the racial composition of the groups in the population and the sample size of the non-White subgroups in the religious groups is too small, so that its quite likely that the overall numbers for the religious groups are distorted as a result of the racial demographics being non-representative, and they don't have meaningful numbers for most of the racial subgroups, but they do have meaningful numbers for the White subgroup.
OTOH, this often results in even more misleading presentation, where the White subgroup of each religious group is all that is reported, but news articles based on the poll still treat that as if it was a result for the religious group as a whole. And it doesn't explain why the non-religious group doesn't get the same treatment, because it almost certainly would have at least as much of the same problem.
It'd probably be better -- for media polls, and media coverage of polls at least -- to either do polls with a big enough sample that your sub-samples in various non-White race/religious subgroups are big enough to report on or just not report religious breakdowns at all where the only way you feel the numbers can be meaningful is just to report the White subgroup for religious groups.
A person under torture will tell you whatever it is you want to hear. This has been shown again and again. The only time where this is useful is if you can keep the methods under wrap and use the confessions to your advantage PR-wise. This is important to keep in mind to understand a proponent's agenda.
How to get your senators' and representatives' attention on any issue without being a wealthy donor | Protip from a former Senate intern[1].
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An email to your senator or representative may result in a form letter response and a phone call to the office may amount to a tally mark on an administrative assistant's notepad. But, for any given policy concern, if you want to get their attention a letter to the editor in one of your state's 5-10 biggest newspapers that mentions them specifically BY NAME is the way to go. If your message is directed to your representative, pick a newspaper that is popular in your district.
That is the crucial thing to know--the rest of this post is an explanation of why I know this is true.
I know this because, when I interned in the D.C. office of a senator one summer, one of the duties I shared was preparing a document that was distributed internally both online and in paper format. This document was made every day and comprised world news articles, national news, state news, and any letters to the editor in the 5-10 largest newspapers within the state that mentioned the senator by name. I was often the person who put that document on his desk, and it was the first thing he read every morning after arriving to the office.
I began to suspect that this was standard operating procedure because several other senators' offices share the same printer in the basement of the Russell Senate Office building, and I saw other interns doing the exact same procedures that I was involved in.
Since the internship, I've conferred with other Senate and House employees past and present and determined that most--if not all--offices use essentially the same procedure.
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[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1os8rz/how_to_get...
And while we're at it, we should sanction those -- like the New York Times -- who enabled and shielded the torturers via a consistent editorial policy -- solidly in place for 12 years -- of never referring to the practice of torture by name, but instead employing that famous dystopian euphemism: "Harsh Interrogation Techniques."
The problem isn't that there wasn't a crime: it certainly looks like there was. I am outraged by parts of what I've read. The problem was that the system sought to legally justify it. The problem is that we changed the system so that a good portion of people believe there was no crime. If somebody is told by the system that there is no crime, we can't then go backwards in time and declare there was one. History shows us that such legal application is always more destructive to society than the original incident.
An important concept to understand is "criminalizing politics". That's when politicians, who rotate through office and are expected to spend most of their lives as private citizens, make decisions that could be criminal but do not involve personal gain.
We elect people to make hard choices that involve results that could be construed in other contexts as criminal, especially with respect to foreign policy. We always have.
I do not like any of this, but it's very important to understand that the problems here are systemic. A different president and VP were just as likely to make the same choices. Want to go back and try people for Japanese interment? All the rendition done prior to 2000? Assassinations and coups overseas? Spying on MLK? Such an emotional attitude is understandable, but you just can't continue a government like that. If the system was acting as best as it could, and it screws up? You fix it. You don't get the firing squads out. That's banana republic territory.
So let's fix the system so it doesn't happen again. If we want somebody to hang, start a nice show trial. But since folks were acting in good faith (which is more important than "just doing their jobs"), pardon them and let's move on. There is no justice to be had here. We need to learn. This is not the time to let emotional outrage lead us into hurting each other needlessly.
I don't think any of the principals in this atrocity ever really "believed" there was no crime. They decided, as Dick Cheney told Meet The Press earlier this year, "I have no problem as long as we achieve our objective." They didn't (and still don't) care whether torture is a "crime". All they cared about was making sure the system didn't get in their way.
i think it's important to continue fighting for justice and for people to show that they don't want to live under a legal regime that accepts these kinds of things.
Edit: I don't give a shit who is "right". My point is that any discussion that degrades this badly should not be here. Go somewhere else to discuss this stuff.
A lot of times we disagree, but this is not one of them. If we're off in Nazi territory, there's no constructive conversation to be had.
I knew it'd be sensitive, but I had no idea.
To compare this behaviour is not 'degrading' the conversation at all, on the contrary it's quite relevant to compare and contrast.
And that's exactly why it's off topic. It's politics.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6120530
You have the whole internet to talk about politics - do you really need to wreck this site with this stuff?
Also, haven't you people ever heard of Godwin's law?
As this article has already been upvoted over 200 times (implying some interest from hackers), trying to stifle further discussion is rather a lost cause.
EDIT: I think everyone on HN has heard of Godwin's Law. It's useful, but can also be a lazy way to quash meaningful discussion.
"Isn't this a lot like the Nuremberg defense?", for example.
Ex post facto is also explicitly forbidden by the US consitution (Article 1, sections 9, 10) [2], and by the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Article 11, section 2) [3].
On a technical level, you can argue that torture was already illegal under US law, however the torturers were advised by agents of the State that what they were doing was legal, so ex-post-facto could very reasonably apply. There may be people high up on the chain of command who can be prosecuted under US law, but for the most part prosecutions would have to go through international law.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_trials#cite_ref-reapp... [2] http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/constitution_trans... [3] http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/
Ask yourself two questions:
Is it ok to kidnap someone, lock them in your basement, beat them and rape them?
Does some shit written on a piece of paper make it ok?
In this case, what was done is illegal under international law, and was illegal under international law at the time it was done, so people can be tried in international court without ex post facto concerns.
I am one of those people who disagree with the Nuremberg trials. If something atrocious happened, but was legal, then we should make it illegal and accept the fact that some people got away with doing horrible things.
I'm so displeased with the government taking actions like this, I think it's preferable if we do cause a massive panic and shut down the system at a high level -- even while we let some of the bureaucracies run -- until we can sort this out.
I think that we need to make it clear that it's unacceptable to cross some lines in the name of "making a hard choice", and that there are personal consequences to signing off on those kinds of crimes -- that as a nation, we mean it when we declare certain kinds of actions beyond the authorization of government.
Were it more timely, I also think that we should prosecute on a number of the other things you listed. Alas, we didn't, because of thinking like yours, and it seems merely to have encouraged more lawlessness from officials.
You didn't actually propose fixing anything: you merely advocated doing more of the same and hoping that it just gets better, nor did you propose any reason that prosecuting people for knowingly breaking the law wouldn't lead to a change in the behavior of officials.
Your answer was a non-answer.
Your post, and I say this politely, fucking sucks. They knew they were breaking the law; they paid lawyers to create bizarre interpretations of those laws; they then strongly suggested to subordinates that torture was desirable without actually ordering it, leaving those low pay employees to take the fall and the prison sentences.
"Only following orders" has never been an excuse for committing atrocities and war crimes.
In a better world, the mid-level bureaucracy of the military and CIA would be a bulwark against this kind of abuse. Politicians will always be opportunists, and the low-level ranks will always contain psychopaths. But the mid-level people can keep both in check, if they have the motivation.
Twenty years from now, when a president asks "is there anything else we can do to this guy?", the answer from the CIA director should be "no, or I'll be prosecuted". The answer from the DOJ should be "no, or we'll be disbarred". The answer from the military should be "we'll resign before following that order, because it will get us sent to the Hague".
As long as dilution of responsibility exists, that problem will remain intractable. When someone follows an unlawful order, both the person that issued it and the person that obeyed it need to bear the responsibility. And to support that, then when someone refuses an unlawful order, that person has to be shielded from retribution and retaliation.
And if someone tries to blow the whistle on unethical behavior, they shouldn't be imprisoned for life or be forced to flee to Russia.
You're not going to cultivate a culture of individual responsibility by pardoning everyone who should have plonking known better than to kidnap and torture people while thumbing their nose at due process.
So you're right: we should turn our efforts to fixing the system.
Based on their actions (which ultimately may have not yielded anything useful either) the torturers and their masters are monsters of the worst kind - state sanctioned.
So now why stop at just releasing the report? Take the next logical step & prosecute these sociopaths.
But they're friends with the cronies!
So it's not going to happen. No matter how many "voters" beg daddy Govmints. Keep cheering though. Maybe something will change. Not.
I believe this is one of the overlooked but very important reasons not to torture. The torturers are also damaged, in their own way. We should not require this of anyone.
The State Department would probably release statements of insane hypocrisy given how they're perfectly fine preaching about human rights when OTHER countries violate them.
US will be in the history books as a country that not only allowed, but keeps condoning torture by refusing to punish the torturers. Brennan even implied that he's not ruling out the use of torture in the future.
Maybe eventually, some new US president will decide that it's time to prosecute and imprison them so US can have a "clean start" in its international relations.
Clearly not a student of history.
The US has been harboring criminals since WWII when Operation Paperclip brought Nazi scientists back here to help build the atomic bomb.
>>> US will be in the history books as a country that not only allowed, but keeps condoning torture by refusing to punish the torturers.
Just like every other country in the world. I certainly don't condone what they did, but on a relative scale, it's a pretty minor considering what other countries have done and still actively do. If they don't include the atrocities the US committed in Vietnam in history books, you can be assured they won't touch this either.
>> Maybe eventually, some new US president will decide that it's time to prosecute and imprison them so US can have a "clean start" in its international relations.
Obama already tried being nice to these people we're at war with and look what it got us. He tried to have a "clean slate" with the terrorists, even said he would negotiate with the Taliban. Yes, the same Taliban who behead criminals, do not allow women rights and approve of honor killings. Because you know, he thought you could reason with these people - right?
Page 10 is the start of the findings and conclusions.
Correction: The UN has said that anyone can if they want to.
http://amanpour.blogs.cnn.com/2014/12/12/cia-agents-who-tort...
http://yidwithlid.blogspot.com/2014/12/feinsteins-duplicity-...
The report (embedded below) shows that the CIA briefed at least 68 members of Congress on the CIA interrogation program, including "enhanced interrogation techniques" (EITs) . It details the dates of all congressional briefings and in most cases, the members of Congress in attendance and the specific subjects discussed. Keep in mind though, that the topic for each one of these meetings was interrogation of prisoners.
For example in April 2002 both the House (HPSCI) and Senate (SSCI) committees on intelligence were briefed on the "Ongoing Interrogations of Abu Zubaydah, who was mentioned in the Feinstein report. According to the report, at this time EITs were referenced but there is no evidence they were discussed in detail. However later meetings not only discussed but gave examples of EITs being used, (but attendees weren't mentioned). Finally near the end of 2002 we see that the most Senior members of the House and Senate committees had meetings totally devoted to EITs.
This is such an important topic, that it is a shame it always has to be discussed in the political context (i.e. Obama failed to bring justice anyone from the Bush administration).
#1. Obama's administration continued using the Bush era Enhanced Interrogation Techniques; therefore, politically he could not pursue anyone from Bush's administration without subjecting his own administration to the same...including himself.
#2 From a legal standpoint anyone who actually engaged in these alleged acts of torture would have a legal defense, they relied on Government officials and attorneys who authorized/ordered them to perform these interrogations. Whether the officials/attorneys were right or wrong in their judgment, this is a lawful defense recorgnized by US criminal courts. See US v. Baker, 546 F.2d 940 (D.C. Cir. 1976).
Therefore, it is a little different that the Nuremberg defense, as I understand it, where that defense is essentially claiming you were ordered by superiors to take an action that was unlawful.
So the practical difference being in one case you know or believe what you are being commanded to do is criminal and the other case you are specifically informed by some government official with authority that the act you are being ordered to do is lawful.
It is somewhat different, its "I relied on the entity now trying to prosecute me". This does refer to the same entity as "Just following orders of my superiors" when the entity prosecuting you is also the one you worked for, but its a substantively different defense in the general case (and note, in the Nuremberg tribunals, this defense would not have been equivalent to the so-called "Nuremberg defense" even in the entity it refered to.)
There is a very good reason for a legal system to have this defense as a bedrock principle that applies without exception within the legal system, and there is a very good reason for crimes against humanity and war crimes to have international tribunals with personal jurisdiction to try them so that this defense doesn't become a shield for perpetrators that happen to be backed by the top officials of a government at the time they act.
On point #1: If I, personally, had to give up my job and perhaps even face personal abuse, in order to stop someone from being tortured....I think I might manage that.
Maybe Obama's administration could manage to summon a similar degree of bravery?
This piece by the Times is about what you'd expect from an organization that has lost its grip on reality. What's worse is that people actually pay attention to the Times at this point. Sadly, what we lack in this country is an honest journalistic broker that can objectively communicate about the political realities we have in front of us and our shortcomings as a nation and an electorate.
Here's the thing, all of us that vote (and those that don't), are responsible for the mess in D.C.. The people that inhabit the beltway are simply taking advantage of our apathy and incompetence as an electorate..nothing more, nothing less...it's up to us, as the electorate, to purge our government of the latent corruption and decay that has come to permeate that town. Until we take up that charge in a meaningful way, we can't even have a discussion about topics such as this, it's just a waste of time..
> The reason he was elected over Hillary was because he initially took a harder line against the war, the spying and the torture.
Have you considered that this is a vast oversimplification, and you're mostly just projecting your pet issues onto 70 million other people? I don't want to just regurgitate talking points, but saying he "inexplicably betrayed our democracy" is probably only inexplicable to you because you haven't wanted to take the time to think it through.
An attempt to prosecute Bush would basically be political suicide, severely damaging his legacy and cementing complete government inaction for the remainder of his term. You can say that's a betrayal of our country, but calling it inexplicable is just silly. Also, as far as I know, I don't remember one of his stump speech promises being to taking the unprecedented step of pushing for the prosecution of a former President. You can project these ideas onto people if you wish, but no one will ever be able to live up to your standards, much less the President of the United States -- a person that has arguably the hardest, most complex job in the world.
The reality is, the president doesn't have a ton of power over the workings of the vast bureaucracy. And remember that the intelligence folks start the President's day, every day with their briefing. Makes manipulation of the executive easy.
A newbie like Obama didn't stand a chance.
This is what the International Criminal Court at The Hague is for.
I didn't realize that we had not ratified the treaty. Considering how involved we were in the Nuremburg Trials, I had assumed we would be just as keen about the ICC.
Naïvely, I didn't take into effect the extent of the USG's cranial-rectal inversion syndrome.
The CIA report was written solely by Democrats with an ax to grind, and sought no information from an opposing side.
Go back and watch any 9/11 news video (as it happened) and put yourself in the shoes of those who struggled to find direction during that time. I personally don't think torture is a good decision, but those in power did it out of precaution to identify possible future acts.
When the next terrorist attack occurs, please think about the bullshit you wrote here.
That simply doesn't matter. Torture is illegal in all circumstances, reprehensible, and completely ineffective. There's no justification, period.
The "collateral damage" of drone strikes, and all of our quasi-war military actions, concerns me greatly, but the fact that drones are involves is immaterial. We've been killing civilians and combatants outside of declared war and emergency situations for a long time now. Maybe that all needs to be looked at again with the result being possible indictments. If so it would go back before Obama and Bush, to at least every post-WWII president.
I want a full, serious, and public war crimes investigation, to include drone attacks and torture. If we find out that Obama, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Frank had a secret meeting to allow torture then I want them and all who knew about it behind bars. Torture is illegal under US and international law. The law allows no extenuating circumstances.
Are you with me?
When ISIS dressed James Foley in orange then beheaded him, do you think that was a deliberate reference to Guantanamo or just coincidence?
If we find out that those predicted attacks of yours occur because someone wanted revenge for having their parent, or sibling, or friend anally raped by US orders ... then what? More torture? Which will help because?
"Sought no information from an opposing side"? Are you saying the CIA is on the same side as the committee members? Because the members certainly sought information from the CIA, which must count as 'an opposing side'. Good on you for saying there are multiple sides; what do you think the sides are?
And you must despise Senator Mike Gravel, who put the Pentagon Papers in the public record without first seeking information from an opposing side. Do you just like it when the Executive branch systematically lies, not only to the public but also to Congress, and tries to keep it hidden? I don't.
Even if you find yourself lacking all morality and humanity, you should still be aware that torture has been proven time and time again over hundreds of years to be utterly useless in getting truthful information out of the victim. There is no justification whatsoever, and there is no intel being gained via torture that could not be better gained in other ways.
The rational conclusion is that torture is not only barbaric, but pointless as well. 9/11 and the irrational stupidity that happened afterwards should not be held up as some kind of divine justification for war crimes.
There are many people who are convinced, e.g., that abortion is murder and that politicians who enable it ought to be prosecuted. Or, more on topic, that Diane Feinstein is a traitor for making these torture memos public. They believe this with as much moral certitude as anyone here believes torture is a crime. It is only a matter of time before another right-wing president is in the White House, and when there is I don't want there to be a precedent for jailing one's political rivals.
I do agree with you that prosecution would not be good for stability. However, maintaining a separate rule of law for those in office is not good for stability, either.
Also your example doesn't make any sense. Creating a law for abortion is not even in the same category as breaking current laws. This is not purely an issue of morality, it's about the rule of law as well.
This article deserves juxtaposition with this scene from the Act of Killing:
http://youtu.be/tQhIRBxbchU?t=2m9s
"We need our gangsters to get things done" @BarackObama
[1]http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec/09/cia-tor...
Apart of course from the fact that any information revealed during torture is usually useless. And of course the fact that it's, you know, illegal.
Would you feel bad? Would you feel guilty? Would you think about the family of the guy you accidentally killed, because you thought that was how to save your family somehow, would you think about the family of the dead guy in your basement, and how they must feel? Would you think that, it turns out, maybe your methods had been disastrous, monstrous even, and should be revisited?
Not if you're Dick Cheney.
Okay, now let's say you're not the one who had the wife and children kidnapped, you're the brother of the guy THAT guy picked up accidentally thinking he was a kidnapper, locked in a basement for a few years, tortured, raped, and killed.
NOW what would you do?
Including something illegal, yes?
This is a stupid argument and has no bearing on whether ot not torture should be legal.