This is the kind of stuff that probably makes some people’s job down the pipe easier and at the same time undermines the Western civilization.
Make no mistake, no US citizen outside of the political class benefits from this or other atrocities. The exact same goes for the surveillance programs.
Losing the moral high ground degrades the whole society.
The whole anti establishment movement rallies around stuff like this. The lefties and the right-wingers will be after different things but they will be able to come together on the hypocritical stance and corruption of the current system. It unites enemies against you who think that the most important thing is to bring down the current horrible governance and figure out things later.
It's a very small step from this to disappearing and torturing dissidents at home. With The View calling for Tucker Carlson to be tried for treason by a military tribunal, I think we're approaching that point.
Then when we get there and someone disappears (say, a colleague, a friend of a friend), some will think and even say "they must have done something". How do I know? Because that is what happened in Argentina during its Dirty War. Oh, I know, most of you will say "that could never happen in my country because we're a first-world Western nation", but Argentina very much was and still is a Western country, complete with rule of law ("Estado del Derecho"), and it was much wealthier then relative to the rest of the world, and had been truly first world in 1950. So, yes, these things very much can happen here in the U.S., and in Canada, and in the UK, and in France and Germany and Spain and Italy and Netherlands and Belgium and Norway and Sweden and so on.
It takes a very small number of men to do most of the torturing and killing domestically. Sure, lots more are needed to do the arresting (disappearing) of victims. But not very many need to get down and dirty. Just ten men killing 150 victims/year would have covered the majority of the killings in the Dirty War over six years.
Asking for a civilian to be tried for treason by a military tribunal for saying... the same things that a government official has said, but in a way that makes the government look bad, is the same thing as abandoning the rule of law.
We've only ever done such things during the Civil War, and even then Lincoln only suspended Habeas Corpus in limited places as needed. And Lincoln violated the Constitution in that case, as suspension of Habeas Corpus is, by its location in Article I of the U.S. Constitution, clearly only something Congress can do (though Article I, section 9(2), does not actually say so), and Chief Justice Taney correctly concluded as much in Ex Parte Merryman. (That said, I think Lincoln by and large did the right thing.)
Yes, we've had wartime restrictions on speech that sucked and were not constitutional and should not have been used at all, both in WWI and WWII. But we didn't treat such speech as Treason, nor did we have military tribunals for those speakers, nor did we suspend Habeas Corpus at any time other than during the Civil War. And those were declared wars. Trial of civilians by military tribunals is really only something you'd expect in a civil war, and only when the constitutional order has fallen apart.
> Asking for a civilian to be tried for treason by a military tribunal for saying... the same things that a government official has said, but in a way that makes the government look bad, is the same thing as abandoning the rule of law.z
But that's not disappearing. Assuming the tribunal found him guilty and gave him X punishment everybody would know (Obviously assuming the tribunal found him not guilty then he wouldn't be punished anyways).
Disappearing would be when your neighbor that always lets his goats chew all of your grass tells the cia that you're a terrorist so they come (and nobody else knows where you went) and get in the middle of the night so you won't keep chasing his goats away.
I didn't say it was. I said it's getting us closer to that world.
> Disappearing would be when ...
Disappearing is when a civilian gets taken (doesn't matter the time of the day, whether anyone notices or not), and the person in question does not get an arraignment in any open court nor any followup open court proceedings (e.g., trial), and where family gets no access to the person, with no way to determine their whereabouts and health or even if they remain living, typically for a prolonged period of time.
(Sometimes the family of a disappeared has connections and can get them released quickly, but most often the family does not, the authorities lie or refuse to say anything about the case, and the person languishes for years before being released unless they die or are killed during the time that they are held in this way.)
In other words: disappearing == unconstitutional denial of Habeas Corpus, often paired with torture and/or murder. A breakdown of the rule of law and constitutional order.
The English invented Habeas Corpus (to my knowledge anyways), and I suspect that they must have had some experience with disappearances during one of their 17th century civil wars.
When Habeas Corpus is suspended pursuant to the Constitution, and a civilian is arrested, and the family is allowed to see them during the time that the person is held, then that is not a disappearance, though the constitutionality of the suspension of Habeas Corpus may be suspect. When constitutional order is restored, the expectation would be that the person would be released or arraigned. Considering that in the U.S. Congress has never suspended Habeas Corpus, and that Lincoln did suspend it, but only in limited areas and during limited times during the Civil War, we should consider that the circumstances that legitimately call for suspending Habeas Corpus must be extreme. Certainly the current situation in Ukraine does not remotely call for the suspension of Habeas Corpus in the U.S., nor for anything like military tribunal trials for public persons who make their opinions heard. It is my fear that calls for the latter are a bad omen presaging the denial of Habeas Corpus.
Why is a military tribunal so bad? And if they’re bad, why are they used for military personnel? I can’t recall anything in the constitution suggesting that military personnel are exempted from having constitutional rights.
The Constitution specifically provides for Article III courts for civilians. Using military courts for civilians would be a gross violation of the Constitution.
Military tribunals are used for military personnel because that is part of the deal, and our military services are professional (not conscripted). Yes, the UCMJ would apply to conscripts, should we return to conscription, but conscripts would still not be civilians, and most civilians would not be conscripts.
Yes, the Homan Sq. facility kinda counts. As for ICE, well, it's somewhat different for people who aren't U.S. persons and aren't legally tourists or temporary residents, though, of course, that should not be license to disappear them, just to deport them (which is not at all the same thing).
You don't need hypothetical Tucker Carlson situations in a world where Julian Assange and Ed Snowden are alive.
I live in the US now but I come from a third world country (Iran) where such atrocities are commonplace. And let me tell you. What is happening to Assange shows that when it matters, the intelligence community is above the law and not that different from those bizarre authoritarian regimes. It's just that their propaganda machine is just more successful at "spinning the stories" and making people believe Ed Snowden and Julian Assange are anything but heroes.
Snowden was a government employee, so he's not as good an example as Assange, but otherwise, yes, I agree. The point about Carlson is that things are getting dicier now -- not that it's surprising, mind you. I don't mean that I care more about Carlson than Assange -- I mean that what is being threatened regarding Carlson is much beyond what was done to Assange.
the rhetoric on all sides has been hyperbolic for years - I imagine if we could graph the use of "treason" or "lock [X] up" in public discourse we would see an explosion around 2014 and continuing straight to today.
What gives me hope is:
a) McCarthyism (surely that was worse, yet we made it through)
b) this language is happening on privately funded cable news that approx 5% (I believe) of Americans watch on a daily basis. That's a far better place than coming from government officials.
> So, yes, these things very much can happen here in the U.S., and in Canada, and in the UK, and in France and Germany and Spain and Italy and Netherlands and Belgium and Norway and Sweden and so on.
These things not only „can happen“, they happened in the not too distant past - much less than a generation ago:
1. There is strong evidence that the CIA ran - and maybe still runs - black sites across Europe used to kidnap people and bring them to Afghanistan or Guantanamo for torture.
2. At least half of Germany used to be a socialist dictatorship until 1990. People disappeared on a regular basis - and those responsible for kidnapping, torturing and killing dissidents still live among us, as our neighbors, as businessmen or members of parliament.
Carlson, a foreign agent? It's just as easy to accuse you of shilling. Please be serious. And if you are, then we're in deeper trouble than I'd thought.
He seems more like an unscrupulous jackass than a foreign agent. Rachel Maddow seems just as ridiculous and stupid, but she seems far less dangerous and I'm not sure why that is. All the 24 hour news stations are FUD engines, but Fox and Carlson in particular have this urgency to everything they say - it's always the end of the world, an agenda, everyone is out to get you all the time. It's exhausting. That said he doesn't seem like a foreign agent, just a typical Fox News personality.
It isn't hard to argue a lot of things that are blatantly false and absurd because, unfortunately, in this day and age so many lack basic critical thinking skills and the capacity to make and understand logical arguments.
Hard to see how the US can claim a moral high ground on anything when it continues to not be a member of the ICC and is even occasionally actively hostile towards individual judges and member countries by threatening sanctions.
Reminder that since 2002, on the books is a law authorizing the US to attack the ICC in the Hague, with the US military!
> ASPA authorizes the President of the United States to use "all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release of any U.S. or allied personnel being detained or imprisoned by, on behalf of, or at the request of the International Criminal Court". This authorization has led the act to be nicknamed the "Hague Invasion Act".
> The act prohibits federal, state and local governments and agencies (including courts and law enforcement agencies) from assisting the International Criminal Court (ICC). For example, it prohibits the extradition of any person from the U.S. to the ICC; it also prohibits the transfer of classified national security information and law enforcement information to the ICC.
> The act also prohibits U.S. military aid to countries that are party to the ICC. However, exceptions are allowed for aid to NATO members, major non-NATO allies, Taiwan, and countries that have entered into "Article 98 agreements", agreeing not to hand over U.S. nationals to the ICC.
edit after 7 upvotes, sorry: I just want to make clear that I still largely support Pax Americana, because the alternatives are worse. But this law is cowardly and actually works against US interests, just like torture.
What about the US abrogating the legal rights of people, terrorist or not, taking them to a black site to avoid their own domestic laws and using them as a training test doll for torture techniques to the point of causing brain damage. At some point every country should be accountable to someone.
Yes, you're right about that. I think teakettle42's objection was to you trying to turn the question around to make climate change the issue that trumps everything else. At least, that's my objection to your original reply.
I'm convinced they know what the ICC is as it's even spelled out above, they just ignore the uncomfortable arguments.
> make climate change the issue
The ICC is the International Criminal Court [0], which is "Trying individuals for genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and aggression". The US is not a part of it after formerly withdrawing about 20 years ago. It shares this position with other countries with strong human rights values like China, Sudan, Indonesia, or Israel.
Moreover the US has passed the infamous "American Service-Members' Protection Act" [1] (also known as the "Hague Invasion Act") which authorizes the President of the US to use "all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release of any U.S. or allied personnel being detained or imprisoned by, on behalf of, or at the request of the International Criminal Court" and also prohibits the United States from providing military aid to countries which had ratified the treaty establishing the court. This has exceptions if the countries in question already have bilateral agreements with the US to the same effect. The US went as far as to criminalize anyone who works for the ICC [2]. None of this can possibly be in the interest of justice but only to protect the ones who violate human rights as long as they advance US interests.
Since the US does not itself punish or even acknowledge any war crimes commuted by them you can see how this is not a matter of "we can't have others punish our people" it's just "we can't have anyone punish our people". There's only one reason for the situation to look like this and that's quite literally to be able to commit war crimes with impunity.
If you were looking at things that put countries like Russia, China, Israel, and others at the exact same level, it's the ease with which they commit such atrocious crimes and go unpunished. But with "due process". That should tell you everything you need to know about their actual values, not the ones claimed on a forum by people who selectively ignore whatever doesn't fit their world view.
What are the specifics of that? Without more detail, it kind of sounds like you're saying American's shouldn't be responsible for crimes committed abroad if the US doesn't prosecute on behalf of the foreign parties.
“Due process” is an individual US constitutional right to have access to our established legal procedures and rules prior to any deprivation of “life, liberty, or property”.
I don’t see a due process violation in your link — just an example of how abdicating sovereign judicial authority can go wrong, as is the case with diplomatic immunity.
The executive branch gave itself the authority to murder US citizens abroad by decree without any judicial oversight based on a declaration of a "targeted killing policy" (Anwar Al-Aulaqi being the first). Seems like those constitutional rights are getting weaker without any legislative or judicial review, no?
There was no "diplomatic immunity" issue relevant in that case. The perpetrator had no diplomatic immunity. She was only immune to prosecution because she ran away, and the US government denied extradition because it would be "troubling".
> “Due process” is an individual US constitutional right
Which basically says "the state must respect the legal rights owed to a person" according to the legal process. And those can range from "you have none because we think you're a terrorist" to "whatever you desire because you're rich enough to buy yourself laws, or at the very least judges".
I will quote something I said just 2 days ago:
> Speaking of due process, 97% of criminal cases don't actually go to trial in the US and are instead settled with plea deals [0]. The sentencing is so harsh for anyone demanding trial and losing that it's mostly a paper right at this time. It does give people the warm fuzzy feeling of justice and correctness though.
Under these conditions having "due process" matters a lot less than you think. China also has laws against having more than 3 children, it just happens that Uyghurs are disproportionately imprisoned for breaking them. Can you think of another group of people being disproportionately imprisoned elsewhere?
> We still have extradition treaties
What's the value of treaties if attempts to enforce them are met with threats from a country with powerful economy and military? The US has repeatedly threatened countries to deter them from ever attempting to prosecute US citizens even for things as serious as war crimes (including the famed "Hague Invasion Act [0]) despite never actually taking any actions to punish this even internally. Like a mob "protection tax", it's not a real agreement if it can't realistically be enforced both ways.
What sort of moral high ground do you think you're defending now? I find it both fascinating and depressing that people find pride in defending such behavior just because it's enacted by their country.
That act refers only to the ICC, which is not a sovereign state and only prosecutes cases that the sovereign states are themselves unwilling to prosecute.
> That act refers only to the ICC, which is not a sovereign state
The ICC only has authority in territories where a sovereign state grants them authority. Hence the act, a threat to invade a sovereign state if that sovereign state follows the legal process they've legally decided (by signing the Rome statute) and prosecute an American citizen
> and only prosecutes cases that the sovereign states are themselves unwilling to prosecute.
Cases that the sovereign state defers to the ICC as their established legal process.
> I'm not especially thrilled with the idea that this can grant you a license to murder me in my sleep with impunity simply because Im not a US citizen.
Doesn't seem to stop other countries from doing this internationally and to their own citizens anyway. Something like the ICC in how you're envisioning things can only work when it's backed by military force. So long story short, it is mainly just the U.S. enforcing things, which doesn't really change anything.
> Doesn't seem to stop other countries from doing this internationally and to their own citizens anyway.
What other countries are constantly drone assassinating people in other countries territories?
The closest to that I can think of might be Turkey and Saudi Arabia with their drone operations in Syria and Yemen, but those campaigns accompany full blown open military campaigns, quite a bit different to US signature strike operations.
> What other countries are constantly drone assassinating people in other countries territories?
So you can only be murdered in your sleep by a drone? Nothing else counts?
But yea sure whatever. Here's 5 seconds of Google search [1].
> but those campaigns accompany full blown open military campaigns, quite a bit different to US signature strike operations.
I think that's a bizarre distinction to draw. Why would a military operation justify anything? U.S. drone strikes previously did accompany full-blown military campaign anyway.
> But yea sure whatever. Here's 5 seconds of Google search [1].
That's neither a French citizen nor is it anything beyond an anecdote. If you can show me France's equivalent to Pakistan [0], then we might be getting somewhere.
> I think that's a bizarre distinction to draw. Why would a military operation justify anything?
It's not bizarre at all; Weapons of war being used in a conflict of war is something very different than dropping weapons of war on a civilian population you are not officially at war with.
> That's neither a French citizen nor is it anything beyond an anecdote.
Well I don't know why it would matter that it's a French citizen. And I'm not sure how in the world you're claiming this is an anecdote as if France's drone strike were untrue. Do you have a direct source that contradicts the account of the French government?
> If you can show me France's equivalent to Pakistan [0], then we might be getting somewhere.
Why would I need to show you that? You asked for an example, not "show me an exact equivalent to this thing I haven't previously mentioned".
> It's not bizarre at all; Weapons of war being used in a conflict of war is something very different than dropping weapons of war on a civilian population you are not officially at war with.
Ok then we're at war with Pakistan (since that's the example you're using). Great now we're back to where we started and you got the "war" designation you wanted.
> Well I don't know why it would matter that it's a French citizen.
Because the US is even droning its own citizens [0], you were the one who originally brought this up as something the US allegedly does not do.
> And I'm not sure how in the world you're claiming this is an anecdote as if France's drone strike were untrue.
In that particular case it's not even clear it was a French drone that got him, the French only reported his passing, but going after him was a joint operation together with the US.
It's an anecdote because France has only been using drone strikes since 2019 and only in Mali, that's about two decades after the US first started droning people and about a dozen fewer countries droned.
> Why would I need to show you that? You asked for an example, not "show me an exact equivalent to this thing I haven't previously mentioned".
I asked for an example of a country constantly droning some place or another, which the US very much does, as the US has the most active and largest scale (global scale) drone program on the planet.
> Ok then we're at war with Pakistan (since that's the example you're using). Great now we're back to where we started and you got the "war" designation you wanted.
The US is not at war with Pakistan and I'm not "wanting" any designations.
You where the one who claimed "doesn't stop other countries" like the US drone program ain't some massive outlier, like the US didn't champion and normalize this for two decades.
And it only became normalized as nobody dared to seriously call the US out on it, even those who are directly enabling such US atrocities [1]
That's fine, but then I'm not sure why you would think something like the ICC would exist in an enforceable or meaningful way. You have a mismatch of expectations. You shouldn't be thrilled that any country has a license to kill you in your sleep. That would include Norway, Australia, Thailand, Russia, Brazil, you name it.
> Oh, I dont think its impossible for a supranational entity backed by national militaries to act as a policeman rather than a mafia don.
One person's policeman is another's mafia don. The international system as it exists, exists how you're describing it (supranational entity backed by national militaries) - it's just that the absence of the premier and effective military (America) makes that infeasible. So railing against America, calling the country a gang and mafia don, and advocating for it to withdraw from international organizations that it basically maintains flies in the face of your stated ideas and goals.
> An EU led super power emerging after an American collapse might successfully step into that role.
I mean that's certainly a scenario of events that could happen, but recent events on the ground suggest the EU is far too weak and neutered to supplant the United States in a meaningful way. It's more likely that the EU would break down and give way to war and conflict than create a unified state - hence the reason for NATO and the EU being created to babysit Europeans who continue to start war after war. More likely is just that the collapse of America (whatever that means) would give rise to either new nation state actors, or China, or some yet unknown and interesting new nation state.
One of the things that I think is interesting that has come out of the recent conflict in Ukraine that was started by Russia is that it is breaking the illusion of rules-based order on the international level and people are apparently very surprised about this.
Unfortunately might does make right at this level of interaction. To the extent that "fair" international organizations can exist they only can exist in that they are enforced by might and power. Actual bombs, guns, tanks, money, resources, and taking the lives of others. All of these organizations: the UN, ICC, WTO, you name it only exist in a meaningful way because they're literally backed by the United States' willingness to bomb or take away someone's toys (Russian yachts), and that you'd advocate for distancing the US from these organizations is to lead to the collapse of them without clear, ready replacements. No country or group of countries has the apparent ability to do this. Even the EU cannot conjure up a single, unified military and impose its will on the world.
Much of this anti-Americanism is geared toward sowing division where there is none and trying to convince Americans to be isolationist so that these international organizations do break down and then other countries can murder and pillage with impunity. I think it's safe to say we can reject this, in favor of a rules-based international order that is imperfect, but can be backed by America and supported by the EU and other participants such as Japan, Australia, Singapore, and others.
For the most part I just view this stuff (being anti-America, destroy international organizations, etc.) as right-wing talking points supported by bad actors to break ties in democracies.
Wait, what? I'm American... South American, to be precise. The US as world police doesn't exactly fill me with confidence, given their track record in our part of the Americas.
Whether this world policing is a "US liberal" or a "US right-wing" thing is of no interest to me. Both camps will call anyone who disagrees anti-American, anyway. (I think right now it's more of a "US liberal" thing but it used to be "US center-right/neocon". US politics are confusing!).
> Wait, what? I'm American... South American, to be precise.
Just to be precise, being American means you're from the United States of America. I don't call myself North American, for example. Neither does anyone else. When you introduce yourself you don't say "Hi I'm the_af and I'm from America". That would be confusing, unless you're actually from the United States.
> The US as world police doesn't exactly fill me with confidence, given their track record in our part of the Americas.
Compared to what?
> Whether this world policing is a "US liberal" or a "US right-wing" thing is of no interest to me. Both camps will call anyone who disagrees anti-American, anyway. (I think right now it's more of a "US liberal" thing but it used to be "US center-right/neocon". US politics are confusing!).
The "let's get America out of international organizations" rhetoric are right-wing talking points propped up by countries that seek to divide democracies. Brexit is another good example. It's not that you're being called "anti-American" it's just that you're incorrect. The rhetorical talking points that discredit our international institutions and create anti-American sentiment seek to destroy those institutions (because they're maintained by the United States) to get the US to withdraw from those organizations to collapse them.
> Just to be precise, being American means you're from the United States of America. I don't call myself North American, for example. Neither does anyone else. When you introduce yourself you don't say "Hi I'm the_af and I'm from America".
No, this is false. I call myself American. We're from the Americas. (North)American exceptionalism is bullshit.
But my point is that disagreement over US policy and their role as world police, and disagreement with their Manifest Destiny, is not "being anti-American". Even the phrase "anti-American" reeks so much of exceptionalism it should be avoided at all costs.
I'm not anti-American. Being American is about cooperating with all of America, not being a bully who doesn't have to comply with the rules unless you're the one writing them.
"Sorry" how? Don't feel sorry for me, I'm happy to remain American and will also always be considered so by my fellow countrymen.
But the point is that using these words, "American" and "anti-American", to refer to how people across the world choose to bow down -- or refuse to -- to the way things are handled by the US, is absurd. If you don't look up to the US you're not anti-American.
Nobody is "anti-American" just because they don't think the US is (or even should be) the guiding light of freedom and morality in the world. Nobody is anti- or un- American because they think the US is not above the rules.
"You're either with us or against us" -- a ridiculous and jingoistic mindset.
Perhaps using "American" (also) for South Americans is popular usage in (certain regions of) South America. You can't just declare that it's wrong just because it's not popular usage in Western culture (which is heavily influenced by the USA).
Indeed, in Latin America we call ourselves "americanos". It's even mentioned in the English language version of Wikipedia for the "American (word)" entry, under "Cultural reception" or something like that. It states "Hispanic Americans" challenge the notion that "American" should be exclusively used for people from the US. It also states the RAE (linguistics body from Spain) also challenges the English language common usage as "abusive" and recommends against adopting this usage in Spanish.
But this is neither here nor there. I didn't intend to lead this in a linguistics direction, but rather towards this notion of Manifest Destiny and exceptionalism, that leads some people (like the ones who replied to me) to believe that rejecting the notion of the US as World Police is somehow the same as being "anti-American".
Since not everyone is from the US, I argue, this idea that we are "all in the same boat" and pushing against US supremacy and above-the-rules'ness is somehow "being anti-American" and "right-wing" is both ridiculous and parochial.
That's fine if Americanos means something different in Spanish. But in the English language it's most typical use is citizens of the USA. That's fine if you want to use the word differently, but don't complain when people don't know what you're talking about.
You are deliberately avoiding the central point, which wasn't about linguistics. In any case English language Wikipedia acknowledges this controversy.
> don't complain when people don't know what you're talking about
I'm not complaining and everyone here does know what I'm talking about.
Actually it was u/ericmay who was complaining about alleged "anti-American" sentiment. Because this is about the world stage and about international rules, the interpretation that America != US is particularly relevant in this case; the interpretation about "common usage" is less relevant since this has major implications for the rest of the world (i.e. that the US is not above the rules and is not the moral light of the free world or whatever).
And that's why the US is increasingly seen as nothing more than a bully on the international stage. And to the point of the root comment, this will fall back on everyone in the US, you included.
I think, while this might have been the perception up until a few weeks ago, the invasion of Ukraine has shown the world what a true "bully" on the international stage looks like. There will always be cloistered individuals who think that anyone who isn't "pure" (for an increasingly variable definition of pure) is evil. That opinion is absolutely fine to have until reality strikes.
The bubble of people who post on HN have been living in that cloister for the last decade or so, not realizing what goes on in the world. At the end of the day, the US has made it a policy to defend and promote democracy across the world, and has actively done so, through it's support of international institutions and protection of democratic norms.
I would add that the US does the above without being willing to be accountable to the 123 other ICC member states along with China, Iraq, Israel, Libya, Qatar and Yemen while demanding the rest of the the world to obey it's sanctions. Do as I say and not as I do is hardly a shining example of democracy. If the planet is is ever to be a globally equitable and safe place for all accountability for all is needed.
The US has killed a whole lot more people and committed a whole lot more war crimes and crimes against humanity than the USSR did in the past 70 years.
Possibly more than any other country in the world.
...what kind of revisionist nonsense are you trying to make up? Like this is objectively false and comes across as tankie propaganda that belongs on Reddit.
Well, then I pass the word to American diplomat (and architect of the Cold war) George Kennan, who wrote an article in NYT in 1997(!), claiming NATO (i.e. US) expansion to Russian borders to be fateful error: https://www.nytimes.com/1997/02/05/opinion/a-fateful-error.h...
Can't you see that Ukraine war is the direct consequence of this decision? To reinforce the statement: all public polls in 90s showed Russians to be very enthusiastic about cooperating with West, they truly believed that the Western model is just and brings prosperity. But it is US' political arrogance and notorious "exceptionality" distracted not only authorities, but people from believing US. People lost trust in US even before propaganda started to arise. Think about it, my American friend.
Of course, living in such a safe island as USA, far from potential enemies and with insanely huge military budget you might think it is not your problem. And obviously you do. But keep in mind that every consequence has a cause.
In 90s US had a unique chance to make this world a better and safer place, but instead US planted seeds of nowadays' wars. Have you heard of Wolfowitz Doctrine (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfowitz_Doctrine)? Even written in diplomatic language, it is horrific. Current US foreign policy is no better.
So please don't BS us that US "defends and promotes democracy across the world", because it simply doesn't. You accuse people on HN of "living in cloister", but it is you who transmits US slogans without slightest hint of critical thinking. Dixi
> The bubble of people who post on HN have been living in that cloister for the last decade or so, not realizing what goes on in the world.
Maybe some, but some of us in Latin America live in countries that at times have been subjected to US "influence" which resulted in subverting governments, abductions and torture. All in the name of freedom and fighting communism, which I guess makes it alright!
How are terrorists(or, random people mistakenly identified as terrorists) a threat to the power structure?
After 9/11, was anyone calling for diminishing US government powers? Maybe a few people, but for the most part - just the opposite - we wanted to hand even more power and money to the federal government.
They can and have been, you only need to end up with a label like "terrorist" [0] and many of these rights will suddenly make way for national security interests.
I used to hear this all the time in law school, something to the effect that the US should never relinquish its sovereignty by signing the Rome Statute and subject itself to the International Criminal Court. This was at the height of the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the associated allegations of POW torture and abuse (e.g. Abu Ghraib, waterboarding, guantanamo bay, etc…). How ironic 20 years later the very same classmates that argued waterboarding wasn’t torture are the same ones that claim they can’t breathe wearing a cloth mask and mask mandates are a violation of their Constitutional Rights because of their often fabricated “medical conditions.”
Back then I’d ask my classmates to look at the other UN member countries not signatories to the Rome Statute subject to the ICC: China, Iraq, Israel, Libya, Qatar, and Yemen. Not exactly a list of countries championing human rights or state Sovereignty, the US included.
Absolute sovereignty is a very romantic notion, but the US gives up sovereignty regularly through other treaties, it is very telling the Rome Statute is where the US and others draw the line. If you are worried about violation of your US Constitutional Rights you should be significantly more concerned about the US government that in the last 20 years has created secret kills lists and conducted extra judicial killings of its own citizens including bombing citizens abroad in violation of the territorial integrity of other nations. When those charged with protecting and enforcing your Constitutional Rights are the ones violating them, I personally like the idea those bearing the most responsibility be subject to an International Court.
I don’t want to say your concern about being subject to the ICC as a civilian otherwise in contravention to your US Constitutional Rights isn’t worthy of discussion or potential concern, but it is detached from reality. Moreover, the ICC has jurisdiction over things like genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity it’s not exactly a “criminal court” the average citizen is likely to find themselves in violation of their Constitutional Rivhts (though perhaps you are not a civilian rather a high ranking military officer, in which case I understand your concern over an international court that prosecutes war crimes and human rights abuses).
I never said it was a complete list. On the other hand you are not distinguishing countries that have signed but not yet ratified the treaty, leaving only 41 members. Of those 41 members feel free to highlight those countries which are shining examples of rule of law and human rights.
> On the other hand you are not distinguishing countries that have signed but not yet ratified the treaty, leaving only 41 members.
The US has also signed but not yet ratified the treaty. We're not one of the 41 who haven't signed.
> Of those 41 members feel free to highlight those countries which are shining examples of rule of law and human rights.
I couldn't name any countries I would consider "shining examples of rule of law and human rights", ICC member or not. Even the ICC itself has been accused of racism and neo-colonialism because nearly all its prosecutions have targeted Africa.
I did notice that Ukraine, like us, signed but didn't ratify the treaty, which I thought was interesting at this time.
> I did notice that Ukraine, like us, signed but didn't ratify the treaty, which I thought was interesting at this time.
It’s a little more nuanced, Ukraine formally declared acceptance of the jurisdiction of the ICC following Russia’s initial illegal use of force and armed conflict in Ukraine beginning in 2014.
Thereafter Russia withdrew their signature from the Rome Statute in 2016 the day following the ICC report on Crimea classifying Russia’s act as occupation.
At the time of the initial signing off the Rome Statute, Ukraine was a puppet state of Russia.
Since then, it has been on track to ratify the statute, recently affirming ICC jurisdiction to prosecute war crimes going as far back as the Euromaiden protests.
You’re playing fuck-fuck games with your arguments and not being honest.
I could just as easily turn that argument around and say “why would the US want to sign onto an agreement that include countries like Jordan and Cambodia that have no rule of law”?
A better question is - which countries that did sign the Rome agreement will conveniently back out when one of their own citizens is up for charges that they don't agree with?
The ICC is no different than the UN - an international body that is a convenient cover for powerful nations to cloak themselves in.
Charges against African despots? Well Europe is on board for that!
Charges for war crimes during the Afghan war? Whoa there! We never agreed to that!
Not really, because my question showed the false dichotomy in how you're trying to frame it. When all other countries we'd consider the closest things to paragons of democracy we have signed it, it paints a pretty clear picture. That picture remains clear even when despotic regimes are about 50/50 on it.
Pointing in the direction of a hypothetical doesn't really change that.
> Charges against African despots? Well Europe is on board for that!
And Europeans as seen from the trials of the war crimes that occurred following the breakup of Yugoslavia.
> Charges for war crimes during the Afghan war? Whoa there! We never agreed to that!
That was a nice dodge of my counter-argument. By your own theory, since most “beacons of democracy” are a part of the UN, clearly they adhere to all decisions by that body?
Of course they don’t.
My point stands - if the ICC starts charging powerful members states citizens you’ll pretty quickly watch support crumble. That’s why the African countries are pulling out - it’s pretty clear how the court will be used and it won’t be pointed towards its most powerful members.
Rather than join that circus, the US would rather bow out.
> My point stands - if the ICC starts charging powerful members states citizens you’ll pretty quickly watch support crumble.
Not really, I just don’t think you understand of the Rome Statue and ICC jurisdiction works.
An aggressor State is subject to the ICC whether or not they are a signatory to the Rome Statute so long as the violations occur within a signatory State that has accepted jurisdiction of the ICC.
Russia was able to withdraw from the Rome Statue, but that’s only meaningful because they are a permanent member of the UN Security Council with veto power, that only applies to 5 countries, and none of them are African. Meaning African countries can be subject to ICC whether or not they are a signatory provided they are the aggressor and the crimes are committed within a country that is a signatory.
The US isn’t bowing out of something it thinks is a circus, the US was part of the negotiation process to create the ICC, the US is a major advocate of the ICC and other International Tribunals, the US just doesn’t want to be subject to their jurisdiction.
- OP was dishonest by listing only a few countries that haven't signed on
- OP argument was "everyone else is doing it", which is not very convincing
- My argument is the ICC is no different than the UN or other international bodies, their authority comes from the most powerful members, so you can guarantee the most powerful members won't play nice when they're in the crosshairs (as evidenced by the current countries' citizens being prosecuted are all minor powers)
> - OP was dishonest by listing only a few countries that haven't signed on
I don’t think you know the definition of dishonest. One final time I list a number of countries that aren’t signatories to the Rome Statute, I never stated or implied that was an exhaustive list.
>OP argument was "everyone else is doing it", which is not very convincing
That is dishonest because that was not my argument and obviously inconsistent with the fact that I gave a list of countries that “were not doing it”.
Lastly your argument fails in light of every other international body the US is a part of, every treaty the US is a part of, and every international law the US is subject to…the irony is that is my argument. Moreover, your argument is “the ICC is no different than the UN or other international bodies” and the US isn’t part of the ICC. because “powerful countries won’t play nice”. If you don’t see where your logic breaks down, try to answer why the US is a member to all the other international bodies you claim are “no different” than the ICC, and the US is part of those other bodies but not the ICC.
For someone who claims to have gone to law school, you either don't state arguments well or you're very good at moving the goal posts.
One final time I list a number of countries that aren’t signatories to the Rome Statute, I never stated or implied that was an exhaustive list.
Let's see exactly what you said "Not exactly a list of countries championing human rights or state Sovereignty, the US included." Your argument (that the US is aligning with states that don't champion human rights) falls apart if other countries exist beyond that list that don't fit that singular conclusion. In fact, many countries that don't respect human right did ratify, so that completely blows up your argument. But you knew that, so that's why you only listed the countries you did.
That is dishonest because that was not my argument and obviously inconsistent with the fact that I gave a list of countries that “were not doing it”.
You said "When all other countries we'd consider the closest things to paragons of democracy we have signed it, it paints a pretty clear picture." How else does one interpret that other than "the US should do it because the other good countries are doing it"? It's a terrible argument - my parents would say "if your friends jumped off a bridge would you?".
If you don’t see where your logic breaks down, try to answer why the US is a member to all the other international bodies you claim are “no different” than the ICC, and the US is part of those other bodies but not the ICC.
It's because the US (like the major EU powers) make a choice - get a seat at the table or don't. Joining provides no guarantees that they'll adhere to the rules of membership. If the UN were to pass a resolution saying "Russia rightfully owns Poland and the land within the prior borders of East Germany". You think Germany will go "gee golly, we're a member of the UN so we better just hand it over". No, they'd weasel their way out of their obligations and defend their sovereignty. Just like the US and every other nation would.
> You said "When all other countries we'd consider the closest things to paragons of democracy we have signed it, it paints a pretty clear picture."
That’s at least the second time you direct quote me on something I didn’t say. That’s the definition of dishonest or you don’t know how quotes work.
If you had better reading comprehension you would clearly see my post isn’t about what the US should do or shouldn’t do, much less about “they should jump off the bridge because everyone else is jumping off a bridge.” My post was about “why” the US isn’t a a signatory to the Rome Statue. The list of other countries not signatories to the Rome Statute, for the most part, have a history of foreign aggression and human rights abuses, the US included, so of course they don’t want to subject themselves to the ICC because it is against their interests to submit themselves to a tribunal that has jurisdiction over their actual and/or anticipated crimes.
> It's because the US (like the major EU powers) make a choice - get a seat at the table or don't. Joining provides no guarantees that they'll adhere to the rules of membership. If the UN were to pass a resolution saying "Russia rightfully owns Poland and the land within the prior borders of East Germany". You think Germany will go "gee golly, we're a member of the UN so we better just hand it over". No, they'd weasel their way out of their obligations and defend their sovereignty. Just like the US and every other nation would.
And yet the US is a member of the UN and not the ICC. Your response does nothing to explain the question I asked you to defend your position, why the US would be part of the UN and not the ICC.
Not sure you replied to the right person I never called the ICC a “foreign court.”
However, whether or not US judges are, or may be, appointed to the ICC or any other tribunal, US judges don’t make them domestic courts nor would they apply domestic law.
From the time of the Nuremberg Trials these kinds of courts are commonly called international tribunals in English, the ICC is just a proper name of one such international tribunal. Another includes the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, which was not a domestic court.
Arguably the first hybrid international
tribunal/domestic court was the Special Court for Sierra Leon where both international
law and domestic laws were applied. If Liberia ever successfully gets a war crimes it is likely to be a similar hybrid international tribunal/domestic court approach. Coincidentally I was part of a law clinic that represented a number of Liberian refugees and torture victims and obtained a $22M judgment against the son of the Liberian ex-President Charles Taylor in the US under the Foreign Tort Claims Act. If you’ve ever seen the movie Lord of War, the son is the character in this clip [2] with the golden AK-47 though the names were changed to Baptiste it’s otherwise pretty accurate, down to the fact Charles “Chucky” Taylor Jr. was a private school kid in Florida with a normal life until he went to Liberia and become the head of his Father’s security force ironically called Anti-terrorism Unit.
But they can still torture according to Scalia. It wouldn't violate the 8th Amendment unless you have been found guilty. Then it would be cruel punishment.
Not just threatening sanctions but actually sanctioning ICC officials [0], and denying ICC investigators visa to hamper their investigations [1].
Which is nowadays commonly handwaved away as the "Embarrassing Trump episode of the US", like it was unprecedented and will never happen again.
But it wasn't Trump who put the responsible ASPA in place, that happened under Bush, and Obama never brought that up as something he disagreed with.
Which is the same dynamic with most of these laws that give more power to the US executive; Both parties keep expanding and enjoying them, it's not seen as a problem because each of them gets their turn to then make use of them.
No. I'm no fan at all of the US regime and the atrocities it committed, but these atrocities aren't a free pass for other countries to commit war crimes and remain criticism-free.
The fact that Blackwater exists doesn't make Wagner any less evil. Whataboutism is using one to shut down conversations about the other.
Worse? Intel obtaibed at the torture extreme is simply not reliable. The cultural need - at the elites' level - to "break" the opposition is disturbing. And yes,ultimately this manifests in the broader culture. If for no other reason, the elites have become normalized to The Culture of Violence and see no reason to change course. Their power remains safe and intact.
Sadly, torture is an industry. Much like so many other aspects of our intelligence agencies, the job is often done by third party contractors.
The most famous is Mitchell Jessen and Associates, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Elmer_Mitchell#Work_as_a... , but it's not the only one. Margot Williams published articles about an airline company used to send people to black sites across the world.
Not only that but it is considered a war crime to torture from my understanding. So how can we look at Russia and say they are committing war crimes if the US blatantly does things like this. We need to lead on a moral high ground.
I absolutely agree about leading from the moral high ground. It's been frustrating talking with ordinary Russians who are reluctant to condemn (even anonymously) that their invasion of Ukraine (including the targeted murder of civilians) is an atrocity because the US invaded Iraq under false pretenses and without UN approval. Of course, it's a significant error of degree to conflate these anomalies in US behavior with the standard behavior of Russia or China or whomever, but by behaving above-board we make it harder for bad faith people to conflate American behavior with that of various dictatorships.
> So many member states are themselves dictatorships that engage in horrible human rights violations—and they stick together. The latter point is key: the worst countries are far more united in protecting human rights abuses than the democracies are in protecting human rights.
> The idea that one side's lies and unjustified violence are better than the other side's is why the wars and hypocrisy continue.
First of all, I'm advocating for American behavior to remain beyond reproach and I favor prosecuting the American officials who misled the American public in the case of the Iraq war.
That said, I heartily reject the binary categorization between unblemished and blemished countries because all countries fall into the latter group. Of course there are differences in the quantity and degree of lying and unjustified violence that your scheme glosses over--the idea that no country is better than say, Nazi Germany or Stalin's Russia or Maoist China serves only gives rhetorical cover to the worst offenders/offenses: "who is Canada to criticize Nazi Germany considering its track record of unjustified violence against its own native population?". This is the worst kind of race-to-the bottom rhetoric.
Stalin, Hitler, Mao, etc. are what happens when we start putting a rating on lies, justice, murder, etc. Yes, these are the extremes. But that doesn't justify a slippery slope that isn't - yet? - one of these historical extremes.
"Oh. Our lies and murders aren't as bad as {insert culture panic button here}" continue to work well for the elites, not so much so for the rest of us.
How about we put a cultural / sociopolitical price on say the USA's three-quarters of a trillion DoD budget? Certainly there's plenty of injustice that could be addressed with that type of $. But instead we buy into the status quo narrative?
That's not working. The point is, let's get our own house in order, instead of manufacturing a narrative that is bold-faced, shameless, hyprocricy.
You're framing this as a dichotomy between slippery slopes. We must either pretend that all sins are equivalent and thus give cover to the worst sins or we must use the fact that some sins are worse than others to allow the "better" side to backslide. The obvious alternative is to hold all parties account according to the severity of their guilt, and demand that everyone does better. In other words, the guilt of one party doesn't absolve the other or (as children understand) "two wrongs don't make a right".
That assumes that everyone is American. I’m not. Even if I were I did not commit war crimes, nor did most of the people who post on this forum.
So it is not true that it undermines “our” moral posture. That is just rethorical gymnastic.
I think the US militaries have insufficient controls to uncover and punish war crimes, and the “American Servicemembers Protection Act of 2002” is particularly disgracefull. I believe the US should do better.
That being said when Russian troops intentionally shell civilians that is a war crime.
I apologize if there wasn't enough context to understand that both I and the grandparent of the person I replied to are Americans. When I used "we" and not "the U.S." it was because I was specifically speaking as a U.S. citizen.
I feel like it's still worth considering that despite the existence of this strategy, acknowledging it doesn't necessarily repair the damage of being seen as hypocritical. Evoking "whataboutism" could even be seen as a sort of counter-deflection in some cases.
The solution is simple: don't use whataboutism. Acknowledge history and context and appreciate that moral relativism absolves no one of their own actions.
This case of excusing Russia's invasion of Ukraine because the US commits war crimes is gold medal mental gymnastics and really only makes sense in the context of the history of Russian propaganda.
>So how can we look at Russia and say they are committing war crimes if the US blatantly does things like this.
One can be a hypocrite and also be correct. Either a nation is committing war crimes, or they aren't. Either it's morally justified to oppose war crimes, or it isn't. You can't argue that the US should be punished for war crimes without also arguing that the US and NATO are correct to oppose Russian war crimes.
Otherwise, the argument is that Russia should be allowed to commit war crimes because the US gets to, which is at best an extremely childish way of viewing the world, wholly separated from morality.
The Rome Statute is tied to territory, so any US citizens that find themselves in a country that has signed the Rome Statute can find themselves facing war crimes tribunals, hence the Hague invasion act. Even with that act in place there's a swath of western countries that former US statesmen like Cheney and Kissinger won't go anymore.
It doesn’t need a treaty for something to be clearly wrong… and like wrong at any level.
I mean the poster at the top of this thread immediately tries to make some justification…
> This is the kind of stuff that probably makes some people’s job down the pipe easier and at the same time undermines the Western civilization.
No! It’s just wrong! We should never do this to other human beings. Period. But you want a GOOD reason why not ?
Because the people you trained to torture abroad one day return home and get jobs like security outside the nightclub your teenage kids are going to. You’re literally training psychopaths which later get unleashed on the public at home.
Also we know torture doesn’t work for information gathering. It’s only useful as a tool of oppression. Which is why we’re actually using it.
But seriously. I can’t believe I need to make the case against torture. It’s just wrong.
The show "24" was an advertisement for torture. I got sucked in at first because it was a bit of a twist and exciting, but soon stopped out of disgust when I realized what was going on.
Exactly. And it came out Nov 6th 2001... not even a month after 9/11. Probably did a lot to shape an angry publics willingness to use torture as a tool in retribution. The writers of 24 (and later Homeland) talk about it here https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/30/magazine/the-creators-of-...
No and I’m not saying it’s a conspiracy. They were opportunistic. I remember back then hearing an interview with the writers who were describing writing each episode of 24 on a weekly basis between episodes. And the article I linked to describes how they tried to use Homeland to reflect more seriously on the ideas around torture that first appeared in 24.
Ultimately they created a show that fed into the publics desire for revenge, post 9/11, and made a big success out of it.
What it leads to is the point I already made - the goal torture is oppression; to create fear and thereby obedience, not gathering information.
Russia is basically stating the justification for the invasion of Ukraine by saying the US did it first in Iraq. The US has already proven how toothless the UN Security Council is and Russia is reinforcing that idea.
Wasn't that the point? That no country inside it could be acted against (veto), as otherwise neither China, Russia, nor the US would have agreed to join?
Neither the US nor Russia (nor China) recognize Den Haag as having authority over them. The US even has a law authorizing the president to use military force to prevent it from prosecuting US service members. It's pretty much irrelevant when it comes to any of those countries. And even outside of that, has ever anyone been prosecuted that didn't comprehensively loose the respective war?
The US is not a friend of the country as it made a law saying they would invade the Netherlands if required.
"The new law authorizes the use of military force to liberate any American or citizen of a U.S.-allied country being held by the court, which is located in The Hague. This provision, dubbed the "Hague invasion clause," has caused a strong reaction from U.S. allies around the world, particularly in the Netherlands. "
What I found particularly depressing that all this was done with an explicit purpose of obtaining a cert. In terms of human level absurdity, I could only think of Brazil movie. It is both ridiculous and absolutely believable.
I agree that the cost of moral high ground is a great loss to the society as a whole. We may never be able to recover from this. Guantanamo Bay is part of normal conversation and barely raises an eyebrow. Without going into details, my boss's kid recently said his dad drone strikes people ( he does nothing of the sort ).
Power corrupts, when you're capable of doing this and go unpunished, you'll have people doing it.
Every government ever had and will have this problem.
What we should try to achieve in our society is to limit the power given to individuals on other people and allow each member of society to be free of centralised coercion.
Nobody should have a monopoly on violence and nobody should be able to forcefully collect taxes from people and then go and wage a war on foreign people.
You can call it being anti-establishment, I call it being morally consistent with the idea of freedom which is so often touted in the USA.
The answer to this is related to the answer of: "would you prefer to be in the lower class of Norwegian society or the lower class of nearby Belarussian society?"
At this risk of being pedantic: the question isn't how we maintain the well-being of other humans, it is how we maintain the well-being of our humans[0] and frankly there's a lot to be said for boot-to-neck diplomacy.
> At this risk of being pedantic: the question isn't how we maintain the well-being of other humans, it is how we maintain the well-being of our humans[0] and frankly there's a lot to be said for boot-to-neck diplomacy.
That attitude with the associated American power was a complete catastrophe for:
A catastrophe for America (Americans) or for the countries listed and their people? Only one of those is relevant.[0]
My greater point here is that global politics is an inherently amoral game. By extension a morality-based strategy is inherently sub-optimal.
[0]addendum: To be clear there are definitely arguments to be made that some or all of them weren't good for Americans (e.g. loss of global goodwill may have resulted in less favorable trade agreements).
> War is not an extension of "diplomacy by other means".
FWIW: War is defined by Clausewitz as the continuation of politics by other means, not of diplomacy. (It's probably the most famous theory of warfare, by the preeminent theorist.)
Clausewitz wasn't normalizing war, but explaining it: it's politics using violent means. If you don't understand the fundemental political nature of warfare then you will make major mistakes and many more will die and suffer. Those mistakes still happen: You can see that the US in Afghanistan lacked a clear vision and strategy for a political outcome. In those countries you see the results of defeating an enemy militarily and not politically. Russia, even if they 'win' militarily, will have a very big political problem in Ukraine.
The idea that war is a crime at the international scale is underpinned by the threat of war, just as the idea that murder is a crime at the personal scale is underpinned by the threat of murder. We fully intentionally put a lot of steps in between because it turns out that dying sucks a lot,[citation needed] but the fact that they stand between radical disruption of quality, er, quantity of life is what gives those steps weight.
That is to say, war is not other means. It is the primal means of diplomacy from which all others spring forth.
> That is to say, war is not other means. It is the primal means of diplomacy from which all others spring forth.
I'm not sure I understand what you're arguing here. Let me spell out my alternative interpretations and tell me which (if any) is what you meant:
a- War is the primary principle or tool of diplomacy. It is by the threat of war that diplomacy without violence can work.
b- Like a-, but with the implication this is the right way, and there's no other non-violent means for humans to resolve their disagreements and organize themselves at the world level. It will always be "my way, or a club to the head".
c- Like a-, but with the implication this is a historical artifact and reflects a sad state of affairs, and that true diplomacy will find a way to work without resorting to the threat of violence. Or at least, that this is a goal worth striving for, even if humans are imperfect.
The distinction matters, because a- and b- make it easy to jump to the conclusion "in this case" violence is warranted ("I hate war, but this is a just war!") and that "boot to neck" diplomacy is sometimes needed and unavoidable. Whereas option c- will always consider resorting to violence a kind of failure and not something to celebrate or chest-thump about.
> war is not other means. It is the primal means of diplomacy from which all others spring forth.
Clausewitz, the leading scholar of war in modern history, called it 'the continuation of politics by other means', so it's not so easily discredited.
> the idea that murder is a crime at the personal scale is underpinned by the threat of murder
It may be partly underpinned by that threat, but my choice not to murder is not because of some threat, but because I very strongly don't want to murder people. That is the case for almost all humans, except the sociopaths. I don't follow HN's guidelines because I'm afraid of being banned, but because I want to treat people well and have a high-functioning community. People want to live peacefully, safely, see others prosper, etc.; conflict happens because we feel threatened.
The idea that people are fundamentally sociopaths seems like a popular assumption, and like many logical extremes, I think that is because of its logical clarity. It's a simple, easy theory to work from. But that's not how humans are.
In the international arena, most relationships are not underpinned by threat of violence. For example, the relationships between most European countries are not that way - that's one reason Russia's attack is so shocking. France and Germany are not fundamentally deterred from fighting because of the threat of violence - why the heck would they shoot each other? They want to trade, see each other prosper and live freely, and make money. Though certainly, lacking an effective international government, it is more anarchic and violent than life in democracies.
Given how easily corruption rots things.... I'd say definitively yes.
I remember, I took part in a modeling competition trying to create a sustainability index for countries. During my analysis phase I realized that almost everything measurably bad you can think of correlated astoundingly well with the corruption index for that country. Even what seemed like very distant externalities.
Absolutely. Morality has great value to human freedom, safety, and prosperity. Humans are social beings, and where morality is preserved they are more free, more safe, and more prosperous. People with less political power are more vulnerable to immorality; it's the vulnerable, not the powerful, who suffer.
That high ground also sets the standard for society. Some people will mock 'moral' leaders, but that leader sets the example for all. If that leader lowered their morals, the maximum, the example of what was possible, would also be lowered for all, to everyone's detriment.
If morality doesn't matter in the least, then we might as well all live in Nazi / Soviet / Whatever tyranny. Who cares if the government kills your neighbors ("they must have done something"), or even you yourself ("I must have done something!"), amirite? Nothing matters, if morality doesn't matter. Live free, die a slave -- whatever, it's all the same? Die of natural causes or be tortured to death -- whatever, it's all the same?
Or, morality matters, we demand and mostly get the rule of law, and then we all benefit from not getting disappeared, tortured, killed.
It's very simple. Everyone needs the State to act morally. The "lower classes" need it even more than the "higher" classes! The poorer you are, the less protection you'll have from an immoral State.
Only in Marxist/Leninist fantasies do "the lower classes" benefit from not having a moral State: because the State will crush the "higher classes" for the benefit of the lower, yeah!!1! That's what always happens!! Not. That's very much not what happened in the USSR.
No, when the State foregoes morality, everyone suffers.
Notice that the antiestablishment movement is not about fixing something but taking down the current state(the individual fractions have different ideas on the fix but they unite on the destruction). Not having the moral high grounds enables that because you no longer have a discussion over how to solve issues, everything is about destroying the current order(since it's completely corrupt and immoral, beyond any repair).
You can expect further disruption, collapse of institutions, political or military coups etc and none of these are great for the low class people. As the establishment crumbles, a time for a new order will come and the left wing, the right wing, the QAnon and others will start fighting over the fix. Some will say eat the rich, others will say guns for everyone whoever wins takes it all and many will be concerned on what would lizard overlords do.
Notice that the antiestablishment movement is not about fixing something but taking down the current state(the individual fractions have different ideas on the fix but they unite on the destruction). Not having the moral high grounds enables that because you no longer have a discussion over how to solve issues, everything is about destroying the current order(since it's completely corrupt and immoral, beyond any repair).
You're mistaking a prevailing attitude today for some "antiestablishment movement". You're right that a lack of moral compass is causing our society to degrade. But "the establishment" and "the barbarians" is essentially the same group - anyone with power or a platform today has learned to package themselves as against some "system" whenever it's convenient and things being bad, it's often convenient (plenty of "rogue CIA officers doing what "the system" won't do to defend America" types out there - they have had publicity with shows like "24" as well). Of course, the prevalence of and even admiration for, unprincipled chameleons is a way this society is degrading as well. But it's situation anyone would have trouble walking back.
> Losing the moral high ground degrades the whole society.
There never was any moral high ground, the establishment were successful at making people FEEL as such. We are quick to point fingers at Nazis, Terrorists, Enemies yet the Western perspective is always 'we can do know wrong, if we did, its justified' which is exactly what the opposing side does.
Once a subtle reminder that many supported Nazi ideals early in America, even as Jews were being sent to gas chambers, companies like IBM were happy to do business with the regime, very much like they do with CCP companies as well as Putin.
There really is no way to change this without outside intervention, I will leave that to your imagination.
> There never was any moral high ground, the establishment were
successful at making people FEEL as such.
I understand what you're trying to say with respect to dirty hands,
and not wilfully misunderstanding you.
But, wrong. There _was_ a moral high ground. It subsisted within the
group of people you claim were duped. Those were and always will be
the people who count, who hold the _normative_ values of a
society. What they "feel" is American Values (more broadly "western
ones").
The "establishment" you mention were the bad guys, and remain so. To
the extent they spit on normative values then claims refuge in the
necessity of dirty hands, they are unsoldierly and they play into the
hands of the enemy who seeks to divide us and undermine our
values. They may was well be KGB/FSB agents in our midst.
What I'm saying is pick up a history book or even read through various things America was involved in all over the world. It is anything BUT moral and yes the average American has no say in the matter in the decision making. So perhaps that absolves them of the sins of the state but nevertheless the blind masses continue to push away these ugly things under the closet with various political labels and in doing so they are implicitly approving these actions because it ultimately benefits THEM at the expense of other humans.
My point was try to see it from the people on the receiving end of pax Americana and tell me why the opposing sides reacted the way they have.
History is written by the victor and you simply don't get to hear from the losers. Therefore, there can be no absolute comparisons. You push somebody to poverty or vilify them, there is no exit but the desired outcome you seek. Once again, narratives is what shapes our reality, and the one that continuously virtue signals is the one that ultimately wins.
May I humbly give you links to some reading which I hope will benefit
your views and arguments in the future. It pertains to a specific
phrase I used above.
So the Noble Lie was real because some people believed it. But those who told it lied. Moreover they didn't follow it. Moreover they were in fact bad guys. And why is that bad? Because they were caught and now those other bad guys will undermine our values... that we don't have (but we thought we did).
This makes absolutely no sense unless you insert some unfounded premise of national/Western exceptionalism somewhere.
I took u/martksn's comment to be that the State needs to behave morally as much as it can. The State is composed of and run by people -- people who are imperfect, of course, who make mistakes, are corrupted, or even outright evil.
We can only try to make the State consist of institutions that keep it mostly moral. Doing so, and mostly succeeding, gives us the moral high ground even when there are some failures.
But when those institutions fail to keep the State mostly moral, watch out, because then we're in trouble.
> Make no mistake, no US citizen outside of the political class benefits from this or other atrocities. The exact same goes for the surveillance programs.
And yet it is worth noting that the US government released this information under their own policies to the detriment of the "political class" and their own credibility worldwide. This is an important aspect of Democracies. I doubt you'd see the PRC releasing documents about the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region which will for sure be received as bad any time soon.
(This is not said to justify the acts in the article to be clear, but to point out a property of Democracies which is important)
> Make no mistake, no US citizen outside of the political class benefits from this or other atrocities. The exact same goes for the surveillance programs.
I don’t know if I agree with that. I think folks underestimate how much conflict in interests “regular people” in different countries really have.
Conflict of interests between communities has nothing to do with a community limiting its own people's rights or resorting to atrocities in order to make the job of someone in the community easier.
See, this specific situation has happened because a worker decided that their job will be accomplished easier this way. For the mass surveillance or denial of privacy for people is based exactly on the same idea: If they have access to people's communications they will spend less time and money to do their job in comparison to more involved traditional methods. I find it ridiculous that people are expected to be harmed or denied privacy in order to improve the efficiency in an institution.
I cannot express how bewildering this comment is. The article in question is about using torture as a training tool -- inflicting brain damage on a person so that folks will learn the valuable skill of beating up defenseless people. Then this comment comes along and complains about the optics of it. Why? Because it undermines "Western civilization". And what's the problem with that? Because then Western civilization loses its "moral high ground". And what will that lead to? That the right- and left-wing -- those good-for-nothings that want to "bring down the current horrible governance and figure out things later" -- will opportunistically use that against the shining city on the hill called Western Civilization.
Whether this torture business is right or wrong is not even part of the discussion, and might not even be relevant -- the whole point is that the angelic Western Civilization might be beset by the devilish "anti-establishment movement".
No it's not about optics and I don't see any value in discussing if torture is right or wrong as it is an age old question. Since I'm not happy about it, I'm obviously on the "torture is wrong" camp and I have no intention of listening about the virtues of torture. Also, an expression of sympathies about the victim will only bloat the text and weaken the point I find important. What's the point of everyone repeating how horrible torture is? I think that must be given.
> Also, an expression of sympathies about the victim will only bloat the text and weaken the point I find important.
The point being about optics. Not about the suffering caused by torture.
> What's the point of everyone repeating how horrible torture is? I think that must be given.
It hasn't been obvious ever since the start of the War on Terror. At least not according to the Bush regime and people like Sam Harris or shows like 24. But me making that point might undermine the moral high ground of W. Civ.
What about parent comment did you think had to do with optics? By my reading it has everything to do with the actual behavior itself, which they call "atrocities."
You can achieve a moral high ground based on your actions. And that's the only way to do it, in fact. But that clearly has nothing to do with this post since it is about example No. 19281 of the CIA doing some heinous shit.
And what's the apparent takeaway from that? That Western Civ might lose its moral high ground. But what about example No. 19280 of the CIA doing some henious shit? What about No. 19279? ...
It has seriously been undermined for the last 20 years (I'd say even 30), that's why guys like Putin who fight in order to bring back a multi-polar world know what they're doing, they're not crazy or anything.
The West has lost its brightness, its shine, its power of attraction (if one ignores the material thing), the reasons for that are numerous and I don't see any way to bring back the "end of history"-times (i.e. the complete dominance of the West when it comes to its cultural and societal influence) many were dreaming about in the 1990s.
Oh, this is far, far worse. It shows the CIA is just as rogue as the Kremlin, and given their history it is fairly clear now that within these two groups there is extreme collusion. The Western intelligence apparatus has been hijacked by a force that is getting instructions from the reptilian brain instead of the cerebral cortex, meaning they are now the enemy.
I'm not 100% sure what the OP intended but there are more generous interpretations:
Many people call [the limbic system] the "Lizard Brain,” because the limbic system is about all a lizard has for brain function. It is in charge of fight, flight, feeding, fear, freezing up, and fornication.
Make no mistake, no US citizen outside of the political class benefits from this or other atrocities.
Given that we don’t have all, or even most, of the data, that’s really just emotionally driven speculation.
And maybe I’m being overly nuanced, but I’m beginning to accept that there’s a qualitative difference between distasteful treatment of dozens of people suspected of having information about terrorists, and the systematic persecution of entire populations.
I’m not terribly concerned that China, Russia, or anyone else is going to snatch and torture random nobody like me, and then justify it by pointing to CIA torture of Al Queda.
Is it possible for you to construct a scenario where torture is morally acceptable?
E.g. you have a virtual certainty that a dirty bomb is going to be detonated in NYC and will kill 1M+ and potentially irradiate the city for decades. Is torturing one person who you know with certainty knows the location of the bomb defensible?
Basically, how many lives would you be willing to sacrifice to prevent the suffering of a single person?
> Is it possible for you to construct a scenario where torture is morally acceptable?
Yes, it's possible to concoct a fictional scenario whereby torturing one person saves millions of lives. Heck, why not a more plausible scenario where torturing someone saves 2 lives. But it's a non-sequitur: a true statement that is irrelevant.
I won't argue this well, especially not well enough to convince someone for whom "torture" is acceptable, but principles matter. It's the only thing that separates the good guys from the bad guys. Not guns, not good looks, not firm jaws, not money, not power, not magical spells. Bad and good people have, or don't have, those things in equal measure.
Torture = bad guy. Beating people in the street = bad guy. Planting evidence on a suspect = bad guy. Stealing elections = bad guy.
This is important because, while some of those things might be expedient to get your desired outcome, it makes society worse. If you do that, you are the bad guy. Maybe the other guy is bad too, but you definitely are. Now when other people do it, you can't say shit. You did it. You could not come up with a better way. Society is now worse and more dangerous because of you. All the bad guys have reasons for doing bad things, but only good guys do the good things, even when it's not easy. Good people say "times are extraordinarily dangerous, so now more than ever we must fight to maintain our integrity and our values, and treat our opponents with due process and dignity, no matter how much we despise them"
We now have a society where torture is considered awful, but that is hard won. Not long ago, we would burn people alive publicly as punishment for Very Serious reasons. When we start saying "torture is ok now because these times are extraordinarily dangerous", then torture is a bit more acceptable when times are not so dangerous.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy discusses a real case where a car thief stole a car with a child in the backseat. The car thief had abandoned the car somewhere, and, as it was summer and daytime, the child was going to cook to death in the car. The police detain the thief and ask him where the car and child is, they offer to reduce his charges, and he denies it was him though they have him on video stealing the car. The police decide to beat the guy until he reveals where the car is. They do and he does. Would you say the police did anything wrong?
There's always this. "Is it okay in this highly unusual circumstance where I set it up so that obviously the right answer is to behave terribly?". The world is replete with these questions.
The problem is that these quandaries are then used to justify shitty behavior in other circumstances. What percentage of cop beatings save lives versus total cop beatings? 0.2%? 0.02%? What's the point of your question? What does the knowledge that you will be beaten if a cop suspects you of a terrible crime do to your state of mind? To the safety of police officers? To society?
I'm concocting a situation that I would like you to consider. Answer, please, with just as much gravitas. Let us imagine a society where beating or harassing anyone is absolutely taboo. In this society, no one need ever worry about physical violence. A woman could walk naked from Chicago to California never once being harassed. An elderly man could walk anywhere carrying a fat wallet of cash without fear of physical violence.
There is the rare and occasional thief, however. Now, one of these thieves steals a car and leaves a child baking in the sun in much the circumstances you describe. Beating the thief is the only possible way to save the child from a grizzly, horrendous, agonizing death, screaming alone for her mother.
But, once done, the beating breaks that taboo. Those police officers are a bit more likely to use violence to get what they want. It's a bit contagious, too. Other people begin to use violence. Bear with me, here. Let's say, because that taboo is broken, 100 more people are beaten over the next decade, and 1 or 2 of them die from their injuries. None of them "deserve" it.
Would you say it was worth it, to beat the man to save the life of that child, knowing that 1 or 2 people die and 100 are beaten, directly because of that?
We've each posed a scenario to the other. There is a difference though. My scenario is a real life event that actually happened. My scenario is a realistic and common sense instance about a moral choice with straightforward consequences. Beat a man to save a child. Your scenario, by contrast, is an unrealistic fantasy with magic consequences. You are asking "Would you do something good, if, by magic, doing something good caused something bad to happen?"
> My scenario is a real life event that actually happened.
Not really. It was a story that a philosophy book used to illustrate a conundrum. It bore resemblance to "actually happened" like a film "based on true events". Are we taking the word of the cops and philosophers or does the man himself have something to say about it? What would have happened if the cops didn't beat the man? We will never know.
But ok, let's grant it, for the sake of argument. For our purposes, it is the unvarnished reality, precisely as the book said. The cops had to beat the man or the child would have died.
The beating of the man had unknown consequences, however, and the construction of the scenario elides them. Is it worth it to live in a society where cops beat thieves to extract information from them? We don't have to guess. Look around you (I mean, assuming you live in the US or similar country in that respect). Do cops only beat men to extract life-saving information from them? The unintended consequence of "it's okay to beat this man just this once" is readily apparent. It never is just the once in that exceedingly rare scenario, is it?
Now, you can answer my question. In the magical society where cops do not beat people, but then do, is 100 beatings and 1 or 2 deaths worth the life of 1 child?
It's a real case that went to trial in New Zealand. The car thief was on video stealing the car, he confessed to stealing the car (admittedly under torture), and he was able to locate the stolen car and child.
As it happens, we know what would've happened had the police not beat him, because they tried that first. The man refused to say where the car was. He would rather let a child die than admit to car theft. Of course, maybe, if they had let the child die a magic genie would've prevented all future crime - it's as plausible as your hypothetical - so maybe the police did wrong after all...
As for your question my moral judgements are tuned to reality, not nonsense fantasy land. I don't have a strong sense of what is right and wrong in a universe that does not obey causality as I know it. I would, however, be willing to beat the thief if it were my child in the car.
Cops beat people quite often in the US, and exactly zero-point-never times is it to save the life of a child. Yet for some reason, you find it necessary to bring up that one time in New Zealand to justify torture. I'm sorry, but I find that baffling. Seems to me very much not tuned to reality, but maybe we should just agree to disagree here.
The original comment of yours that I replied to says that "torture = bad" and that all that separates good and bad people is principle. I have two reasons for challenging this. First, it's just not true. Torture, in some cases, is completely justified. These cases are both hypothetical (you need to find the dirty bomb going to kill millions) and real (beat a car thief to save a child). Second is to question the underlying principle that makes torture usually immoral.
I can ask it no clearer: Given that your counterfactual is an exceedingly rare edge case, why do you feel it is important to counter the valuable moral heuristic of "torture=bad"? What are you gaining by doing that?
Yes, obviously. At the very least, they very obviously broke a law. They should file charges against themselves. The legal system is not absolute and a court / jury can decide about extenuating circumstances.
I can think of few laws that don't allow me to construct some extremely hare-brained counterexample where it might be morally justified to break them.
It's not obviously wrong to break a law to save a child's life though. In an extreme example, would you speed to take a dying child to the hospital? I think it would be wrong if you would refuse to (unless you had some calculation that speeding would make you less likely to save the child).
Laws are ethics - they are rules that tell us how to act. Right and wrong are descriptions of morality - which is about good and bad. It's certainly a violation of the clearly established rules to beat a man to save a child, but it's not obviously wrong to do so. I would say it's not wrong at all.
>It's not obviously wrong to break a law to save a child's life though.
I don't think that's a fair interpretation of what was said. The claim made was that they broke the law, which is wrong to do on deontological grounds, especially for the institution tasked by society with enforcing the law. They may be justified by utilitarian ethics, but a police department setting the precedent of "if we believe the need is great enough, we are free to ignore the law" is both wrong and illegal. That's the fundamental principle at stake here - the same base argument that leads governments to suspend civil rights for the sake of security. "It is terrible for these people to die, so we need more power to prevent it." A ratcheting system that cedes ever more ground to autocratic forces. It's not like this process has been particularly hidden from us; there are many here who remember the US before the PATRIOT Act was put in place, after all.
The cost of not beating this thief might have been a child's death. The cost of beating him is instilling a norm that police have the right to beat prisoners. And because the change in societal norms is so slow, and the grief of a dead child so sudden, this always seems like a good trade. You would be a monster for saying that the rights of a car thief are worth a dead child. Until police prisoners have no rights. Until political prisoners have no rights. Until people have no rights.
End-to-end encryption is evil! Only a criminal would want to hide their activities from the police! A social credit system rewards pro-social activity and prevents instability! This state of emergency is only temporary - life will return to normal very soon! A surveillance state is much safer than a free one. As long as you have no issue with the state.
The civil rights we benefit from are measured in the blood of innocents. As cold-hearted as it is to say, if we are not willing to allow innocent people to die to protect civil rights, we will not have them for long.
> The claim made was that they broke the law, which is wrong to do on deontological grounds
That...depends on your chosen deontological framework. In deontological ethics some acts are morally obligatory (or prohibited) independent of their effects on human welfare, but which acts are obligatory or prohibited depends on the deontological framework selected.
You could select a deontological framework where “obedience to the letter of the law” is always morally obligatory, but I think most people who subscribe to deontological ethics would nonetheless reject that framework.
Certainly, but it appeared to me that the post claiming that what the police did was wrong was indeed operating from the framework that a police department not subjecting itself to the laws it upheld was wrong in the deontological sense. Hence the claim "Yes, obviously. At the very least, they very obviously broke a law. They should file charges against themselves." That's not a utilitarian statement - it operates from the framework that the action itself regardless of circumstances was wrong, and while a jury or judge could exonerate them, they still have the duty to place themselves under arrest.
As long as the police are willing to face a jury for their crimes, it is fine. A jury will probably let them off but the police can not be judge and jury because the line keeps moving.
I feel like these situations make the implicit assumption that violence is the ONLY possible way when it is in fact just the easiest and fastest way, with very mixed and inconsistent results. In the given situation wouldn't the obvious thing be to offer him total immunity? Was making sure he was punished for something worth the life of the child? What if he had given them incorrect info just to make the beating stop?
I would say yes they were in the wrong. It was a bad choice even if its one I would likely make myself. Maybe the insistence that morality is strictly on a continuum from "good" to "bad" is part of the issue.
This is very different and clear cut case. I will leave it to legal scholars to debate whether the police was justified. Trying to compare this to a case when the guy is being tortured for training purposes is sick.
In theory since the case is so trivial they could be convicted and immediately given complete presidential pardon with clean record or whatever is the equivalent.
Or jury nullification can be used. There would be no way I as a juror would declare them guilty.
My comment was in response to the "torture = bad" part of the parent comment, not an attempt to justify using detainees to practice your torture techniques.
He was also tortured in a "regular" way on a basis of being relative. And he is still tortured - what else do you want to call keeping him in for so many years without charges and trial. Any way you spin it it is sick. And what good did it do? Care to share accounts of people saved from an imminent death by torturing this guy?
That's one viewpoint. In some situations, it allows innocent people to die in large numbers. That's part of the moral situation too. Ignoring it, insisting it's all black-and-white, is easy from an armchair.
Yes the police are in the wrong for torturing him. If the thief says nothing and the police find the car with a dead child inside he gets murder charges added to his grand theft auto charges. This is already the established law when a death occurs during the commission of a felony. It's why get away drivers for a bank robbery can be charged as well with the murders that happened at others' hands inside the bank.
You attack the problem with the rule of law, not unleashing your justice system from the reins of lawful behavior whenever they internally deem it convenient.
Literally our entire justice system is built on the idea that the only ethical option is that victims and families of victims don't decide the flow of our justice process, and in fact require anyone who is too close to the victims to recuse themselves.
Turning it around, how would you like if the police tortured your child in a case of mistaken identity? Looking at the members of my high school class who became cops, they weren't exactly known for being the brightest bulbs in the box, but always acted with confidence despite that.
> Literally our entire justice system is built on the idea that the only ethical option is that victims and families of victims don't decide the flow of our justice process
No, it's not, and the divergence between reality and this description is increasing, essentially monotonically, over time, with legal incorporation of “victim’s rights” into the criminal justice process.
That's not to say it shouldn't be as you describe, just that it isn't.
Victims rights stop at the boundaries of the rights of the accused. They boil down to being explicitly notified of changes of public information like court dates and release dates, the ability to be present for public proceedings, and reaffirming their protection from the accused WRT instruments like restraining orders.
No, actually the entire point. Feeling specially protective of children is built into parents. Non-parents may not feel the same way. Its obvious really.
Interesting. Imagine that you were the car thief, and did not know about a child, what reason would you have to believe the police? They lie and apply torture to get confessions after all.
Saving the child would be the consequence of the wrong action. It just happens that this particular consequence is the desired one. This doesn't magically transform the ethical value of an action. Thinking otherwise ("Finis sanctificat media") is the root of all kinds of evil in the world.
Should they have done it (acted wrongly)? I don't know, they have their own free will.
In the end, what you are asking comes down to some form of the "Trolley Problem" [0]. The critique towards the Trolley Problem can be directed towards your (very) hypothetical scenario as well:
> In a 2014 paper published in the Social and Personality Psychology Compass, researchers criticized the use of the trolley problem, arguing, among other things, that the scenario it presents is too extreme and unconnected to real-life moral situations to be useful or educational.
I can't say, how I would react in a given situation. I don't know, if I could torture/kill one (or a few) for the survival (or a better chance of survival) of a larger group. Because in the end one would have to ask were to draw the line. From a strictly utilitarian point of view killing one person to secure the survival of two others is a net positive outcome. But it feels morally more than wrong.
Where to draw the line. 1 against 50? Against 1000?
> From a strictly utilitarian point of view killing one person to secure the survival of two others is a net positive outcome. But it feels morally more than wrong.
Well of course all sorts of definitive truths feel unintuitive or wrong to humans, perhaps that's just a limitation of our brains. From this utilitarian pov the net positive outcome is the morally correct one.
Is there something like a "definitive truth"? Being an atheist, I would say, that this is an overly simplistic view. But that would be my personal take on that.
Utilitarianism isn't a rational choice. What if - in my extreme example, one of the two surviving people would have been Hitler?
Or even less dramatic, still contrived: What if the person being killed would go on and invent a cure against cancer?
You can't predict the future and these contrived examples only show, that (probably) every theory/philosophy can be brought to its knees by going to its extreme conclusions. So how to quantify "value"? How do we calculate the consequences of our decisions? We can't imho.
> What if the person being killed would go on . . .
Don't worry about it. If they would cure cancer, redux hitler, etc, they will even if not seen here. Flip your coin; accept the result; one's feelings afterward don't offend the multiverse.
Ahhhhh I see. No need for many wise people discussing implications of actions and values for hundreds of years. Just throw in 4 words, 2 numbers and 1 logical operator. Eureka: Philosophy is solved.
> one's feelings afterward don't offend the multiverse.
Your solution seems to be "religion" providing consolidation.
I could absolve myself with the "Many worlds interpretation" into thinking that I don't need to care for the consequences of my actions and "accept the result".
The same way I can be absolved by a priest and still imagine myself joining the nice people in "heaven". For me personally it sadly just doesn't work that way.
In my worldview actions (or inactions) have consequences. Being an adult made me realize that I have responsibilities. And that I need to accept that I need to take these serious. One example:
If I step out of my door tomorrow and find a little crying baby on my doorstep with no one else in sight - while not at fault for the situation - I would still be responsible for this little human being. At least until there is a solution that relieves me from said responsibility. Until such a moment I need to step up and act.
The same for if I refrain from killing one person to rescue hundreds/thousands (or even just two), the consequences of my actions are my responsibility. They weigh on my consciousness. The same if I decide to rescue others by acting and torturing/killing someone.
If I act in self-defense or the defense of others ("Notwehr" and "Nothilfe" in German) I am still responsible. I might be acquitted in court. But I still need to step up and defend myself in court. I am responsible for my actions as well as for my inactions. The latter just is more easy on our consciousness (at least that is what psychology tells us).
> Being an adult made me realize that I have responsibilities. And that I need to accept that I need to take these serious.
Ok Atlas. Don’t close the thought without the realization you have limits, that your mind is finite. If you pick up the baby, is it made of tar? Are you Horton, or do you call up the child welfare authorities and release the baby to someone else’s care?
In a worldview of responsibility for consequences of one’s actions, from where do those actions come? Are they not the consequence of other actions from within or out? It action-consequence-responsibility a graph or a fabric of interrelations?
Yes, of course, anyone with a decent imagination can do so.
Unfortunately, that has little practical impact.
I can construct a lot of scenarios where I build an amazing startup and become a billionaire seemingly overnight.
Tragically, my bank account balance always seems to ignore the brilliant scenarios my mind comes up with.
Honestly, outside of philosophy departments questions like this aren't terribly useful.
The problem with your question is that ignores the specific circumstances of this case - where there obviously was no dirty bomb, there was no "certainty", there were not one million lives at stake in some definite deterministic sense.
>Honestly, outside of philosophy departments questions like this aren't terribly useful.
I disagree completely. The fact that you can construct such a scenario says something very important about it. That it is not totally morally indefensible and the discussion is not one about a binary choice but one about degree.
Even if morally acceptable, the torture should still be highly illegal. Like any citizen, the interrogator can make their own moral analysis of whether the crime and their own punishment are worth it. Anyone allowing or covering up the torture is equally guilty. If a firefighter can give their life to save one other, the interrogator can choose to give theirs.
People keep bringing up these hypothetical thought experiments, but they are just wildly unrealistic. Also, they approach the topic from the wrong end: I shouldn't have to justify not to use torture. The abolishment of torture is a milestone of Western civilization.
> Do we have any evidence that torture actually works?
Most evidence points the other direction.
> Finally, an exhaustive 2014 report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence analyzed millions of internal CIA documents related to the torture of terrorism suspects, concluding that “the CIA's use of its enhanced interrogation techniques was not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation from detainees.” It adds that “multiple CIA detainees fabricated information, resulting in faulty intelligence.”
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/we-rsquo-ve-known...
>Basically do we have any examples of this sort of situation, where there was an imminent threat to life and people were saved due to torture?
In the made up scenario you could make a case that even if there is a low probability of torture working, the scale of lives saved would make it worth it. A 20% chance of saving 1M people is still net +200k lives.
> Is it possible for you to construct a scenario where torture is morally acceptable?
Sure it is. But if torture was limited to only cases as clear-cut as the one you propose, it would be virtually non-existent.
For such rare, extreme cases, it's better to keep it illegal, and hope an interrogator will risk jail to save the million people (and possibly be freed by jury nullification), than (effectively) legalizing it, and have its use creep to anyone merely suspected of terrorism (as defined by, from the point of view of the torture victims, an invading force), by an organization unaccountable even to citizens of its own country.
> it's better to keep it illegal, and hope an interrogator will risk jail to save the million people (and possibly be freed by jury nullification), than (effectively) legalizing it, and have its use creep to anyone merely suspected of terrorism (as defined by, from the point of view of the torture victims, an invading force), by an organization unaccountable even to citizens of its own country.
Well I believe this is technically still the case in the US.
I am appalled at your insinuation, but even more appalled at all the replies that take your premise at face value.
No. No, there is no such scenario. You can coerce the information out of someone who has the knowledge in other ways, if that is the problem, even though that problem never actually surfaces outside of bad TV show plots.
Torture is wrong. It does not work. It often, in fact, does the opposite of work. It debases our humanity, our civility, and society. It makes the world a worse place in so many ways, I find it sad that otherwise intelligent people are even pondering this.
No. Torture is not morally, legally, or ethically acceptable.
How come when someone posts a link about a heinous gang rape no one ever replies with 'Is it possible for you to construct scenario where rape is morally acceptable?'
Riddle me that and you'll have answered your own question and hopefully had an epiphany along the way.
Even if you can construct a morally acceptable edge case it should still be illegal.
In these extreme edge cases the people on the ground can be expected to break the law and break out the thumb screws. After all if you're willing to torture someone your own freedom is presumably a relatively mild price to pay... right?
We could then hope that the citizens enforcing the legal system will recognize the correctness of their actions and let them off.
Legal torture exists because the powerful don't see themselves as answering to anyone.
I remember that soon after 9/11 the tv show 24 started exploring "justified torture" scenarios, in retrospect I'm pretty sure it was not a coincidence.
Historically, torture was far more likely to be used on accusers and witnesses than presumed perpetrators. The idea is that if you're tasked with some sort of policing role and can't possibly figure out who is in the wrong, you just beat up both the accuser and the alleged perp. Chinese justice in the imperial era worked pretty much the same way: criminal punishment was neither explicitly retaliative nor restorative in intent. The basic dynamics is that this hopefully makes it less likely for people to lie, since no one sane would want to risk being beat up unless they had an actual grievance and no other way of addressing it.
If that's true it's fascinating, could you suggest a resource I could use to learn more about this? If you know you are both just going to be punished and justice wasn't retaliative nor restorative, what would be the point of bringing a grievance to the authorities?
If you know with certainty that the person knows the location of the bomb then you also know where the bomb is located.
It the same issue when the police and prosecutor know all facts with certainty. At this point you don't need a court, a judge or a jury. In an artificial system where everything is know with perfect certainty you don't even need police and prosecutors, just a method to punish the guilty. A legal system is only needed in order to determine who is guilty and who isn't, and this is unnecessary if we know already who is guilty.
How would you know its 90% certainty? Even attempting to measuring certainty has an uncertainty factor in it.
We know with some uncertainty the murder rate each year, and from this we have some measurable number that a person might be murdered. But we also know that murders tend to occur in non-random ways. At what murder rate should we start to arrest people at random?
They are fun thoughts experiments, but as guides for real life they work about as good as extreme simulations which removes mass, gravity and air friction.
for one, the marine general Mattis said he was against torture. Not because of moral issues, but simply because it was ineffective. People will say whatever they think you want to hear to stop being tortured, which then leads to a lot of really bad and false intel
THIS. "Does Not Actually Work In The Real World" (no matter what Hollywood, or your own imagination or seething emotions might say on the subject) is a 100%-All-Cases-Covered "NO" for "...ends justify the means..." bullshit.
Exact same reasoning as "thou shalt not brutally beat epileptic children, to try to cure them by driving the demons out".
No matter what principals you hold I can come up with a scenario where you will violate them. It does not make you unprincipled.
States using torture is a long way down the hole. It is such a shame that a dynamic exciting creative society like the USA's has fallen so far. It would be possible for the country to be a beacon of hope and civilisation. Instead it has become just another in a long line of grubby corrupt super states.
Absolute certainty that the victim has the information you want is a pretty high bar to clear. Philosophical thought experiments notwithstanding, some things are best regarded as deontologically forbidden in practice, no matter how consequentialist one leans otherwise.
A typical scenario for this question, but not a good one. There's no reason for torture to work on this person, you have no timely way of verifying what they're saying, and you're going to hurt/kill them whether or not they give you the answer. They're just going to lie to you.
What you have to do is credibly threaten to torture or kill their family members and loved ones, to rape their children. This works. Are you a bad enough dude to rationalize that?
Probably many are, but for a person crazy enough to do such a horrible act such threats would also likely not work (either "nothing to lose" or "don't care about anything anymore").
As a society I think we can only try to avoid creating enough people who have "nothing to lose" or "don't care about anything anymore"... They're basically "cancer cells", once at least one survives long enough to "do it's thing" (recruit team, deploy destructive thing etc.), there's nothing you can do besides damage control, you don't "interrogate a cancer cell", they're either irrational, or have no rational reason to help you regardless of any threat or pain you apply.
But you're right, torture would only work for "regular criminals/terrorists" for which... one shouldn't need torture, threats and rewards for collaboration would be enough. But these "regular bad guys" would not do stupid s like mass attacks on "civilians".
Generally if you end up thinking you absolutely need actual torture you've already f up badly, you're seeing things wrong, and sooner or later s will hit the fan for you or your organization... it's more of a sign of incompetence!
> Probably many are, but for a person crazy enough to do such a horrible act such threats would also likely not work (either "nothing to lose" or "don't care about anything anymore").
War isn't crazy, and participating in attacks on [your country] doesn't mean that one is irrational or doesn't care about anyone in the world. Just because you are willing to give your own life for a cause doesn't mean you have nothing to lose.
The reason I say it works is because it actually works, and has been used by states many times, esp. in South America by US trained torturers, but also by plenty of others, like the Khmer Rouge. The point is credibility - and if somebody has planted a dirty bomb in some city, you can't credibly give them any reward for telling on themselves. You can promise things, but they will not believe you. If you're Pinochet, though, you can credibly threaten to have someone's children raped and murdered, because he did it all the time. He can credibly promise to do it even after the bomb goes off, and after you've been executed, because he's done it to others. He can have them brought to you and have it done in front of you.
The US also uses this tactic, although since it will never carry it out (although it will carry out deportations, indictments, etc. for family members) it relies on a lot of playacting. There are stories of the US pretending to torture family members within earshot of people being interrogated.
Planting a dirt bomb in a civilian inhabited city is way beyond war... 99.9% soldiers fighting in a war would not participate in anything similar to this... Even when a city is bombed to the ground, that generally happens well after beginning of a conflict and most people have been at least given one chance to run away or surrender... Most people who plan their lives well enough have a decent chance to at least evacuate vulnerable people from war zones (at high cost, sacrifice, but still).
The propaganda people currently trying to blur such lines are CRIMINAL imo...
> like the Khmer Rouge
Not sure how well this (or anything else) worked for them... afaik they ended up massacring a large part of their civilians population because they were paranoid and couldn't figure out who to trust, or had crazy ideas about who the ideal future citizens should be...
Yeah, sure, torturing enemy fighters to give away military secrets probably works just fine, just don't do it on a large enough scale or you'll just motivate the enemy to faith-to-death instead of risking to get captured... and this would likely nullify any advantage you'd gain.
There's a big gap between "regular war" and "total unrestricted violence and terror", that's why we talk of "war crimes"...
The Khmer Rouge's system was designed to prove any claim put forward by officials and allow anybody to be slaughtered. People went in, and were murdered after giving lists of family and friends to stop the torture, who were then tortured, forced to confess and killed in the same way.
It was absolutely monstrous, and designed to back up (mostly) false statements of Soviet, Vietnamese and US infiltration, and that certain nationalities sand ethnic groups were collectively working to sabotage the government. Torturers were trained with pseudoscience, such as claims that if you strangle a victim and their heart rate increases, they are lying.
The result was the Cambodian communist party splitting and joining with the Vietnamese to expunge Pol Pot, and the Cambodian Genocide. I don't know how exactly any of this 'worked'. It did the opposite of create a secure state and confessions were merely used as an excuse to justify the existing hatreds of the Khmer Rouge.
World-war, total-war of the type that's making people anxious, that's pretty damn crazy. Sure, some wars don't operate that way, but those are irrelevant.
...maybe "information extraction" and "torture" are not exactly the same thing? Extracting valid information from hardened bad guys would probably work better by using other means than physical pain (eg. threaten wiping out their family or close ones, drugs + yes-no questions under and MRI brain activity scanner etc. etc.), pain and brutality applied to people already crazy and quasi-suicidal to begin with would only give you a mix of nonsense, lies and irrelevant infos that you'll not be able to separate well and fast enough to figure out how to prevent that bomb from going.
I mean, you're probably not torturing average-Joe working-in-an-office with 2.5 kids and a white fence house :)
I think most interesting construct would be, allowing someone to torture someone, only with condition that in the end torturer is killed, while torturer decides with totally free will.
No not really. Dirty bombs and people motivated to detonate one don't spontaneously appear in New York or anywhere. It always has a prelude, some kind of injustice(perceived or real) by you towards a community(drone strike school children bus kind of stuff) that you fail to exterminate and they come back to you.
Fixing terrorism by more surveillance, torture, less rights might delay the detonation of a dirty bomb but since the core issue remains nothing is solved.
Besides, there are very effective techniques against information extraction through torture, like dividing organisations into cells.
IMHO, if it comes to torture 1 person to save 1M+ people there's likely to be another person who you will fail to catch and that person will take down the 1M+. I don't believe that the scenario of torturing 1 person and saving 1M+ exists beyond games and movies.
After years of torture, dronning and gunning people, the US left Afghanistan and people were falling from the skies when trying to run away. Did you miss that? Why do you think that torture can be an effective tool?
What if by detaining and torturing an individual or a few key individuals you could prevent the death of many of your citizens and widespread destruction - through a bloody civil war. It would be for the good of the people. <--- most Autocrats
This is a good moral question, and really is going to come down to personal belief.
I absolutely do not believe governments should be able to torture someone, for any reason, regardless of the consequences. It has less to do with the suffering of a single person, and more with the constant and consistent scope creep that enters every government program coupled with the ability for any and all governments to be full of faceless, and therefore blameless, bureaucrats.
Torture to save 1 million people today becomes torture to save 10 people tomorrow. If no one can be held accountable, then it becomes torture to stop a robbery instead of genocide.
If you let your morals slip once, you are an immoral society. Like it or lump it.
Edit to clarify: I am 100% anti-torture in any situation. I didn't think that needed clarification?
"Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last. Imagine that you are doing this but that it is essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature -- that baby beating its breast with its fist, for instance -- in order to found that edifice on its unavenged tears. Would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me, and tell the truth."
No, because I am not the one responsible for those deaths. I am absolutely responsible for the torture, if I perform it.
It is a travesty and a tragedy, but morally, if I did my best within the bounds of the law, what else is there? If there is no rule of law, what's the purpose of the whole thing? If torture is negotiable, why not speeding? Why not kidnapping (which might be implied in the torture)? Why not eliminating the right to a fair trial (again, maybe that's implied)?
Why should it matter? We could save three or four lives by ending just one. Surely, the lives of four people are at least a few times more valuable than that of one.
Someone stole the car with the baby inside. Police caught the thief, but there is no car or the baby. There is a heatwave and the baby can last max 2h in the car. The thief panicked and dumped the car somewhere. He is not willing to tell where it is.
Beating him up to get the info is acceptable ethically.
They can threaten the thief with murder charges, promise a reduced sentence if he tells the location of the car, etc. Do you really think beating up the thief would be more effective? Life is not a hollywood action movie.
On TV they give up everything they worked for and believe in if you break a few fingers. In real life, they just lie to you, you run back and forth trying to verify the lies, then 2 hours have passed.
edit: Americans (and others) have been taught to believe in torture like a religion, to continue to associate torture with truth. Torture is an argument; you're arguing with people that it's in their best interest to do what you want them to do. It is rarely an appropriate argument, and rarely an effective argument. It's far easier and more effective to convince them that cooperating with you is the right thing to do, and that's still not easy. But there are tactics, such as complete isolation and control over their environment, rewards for any sort of cooperation, friendliness and human connection, actual rhetoric and discussion, periods of complete disorientation alternated with periods of calm, pandering to their egos. They don't work in two hours.
> “Ammar fabricated the information he provided when undergoing EITs,” it said. “He later admitted to his interrogators/debriefers that he was terrified and lied to get agency officers to stop the measures … Ammar also explained that he was afraid to tell a lie and was afraid to tell the truth because he did not know how either would be received.”
Which is pretty much all you need to know about torture.
> Which is pretty much all you need to know about torture.
When torture or "EIT" is used for a source of intelligence, using that sole point of data as proof is fraught with peril. Dropping JDAMs on a building fingered solely by a detainee is sure to get random bystanders killed. Running a raid, similarly, might well be a trap.
However, when one corroborates this with other sources of data, it is a "valid" technique. When one uses a piece of intelligence from a detainee as a starting point and further validates the veracity of the claim, it is a "valid" starting point.
This isn't to say whether or not this path counts as moral, just that the "torture doesn't work because lies" is itself dishonest.
To my knowledge, the American torture program has produced literally no novel information. Every piece of intelligence the CIA claimed was discovered with torture was, in fact, already known from other sources. We have done the experiment and found a success rate of 0%. Whatever you think you understand is wrong.
Indeed. The inefficiency of torture has been demonstrated many, many times.
It has also been recognized as such by many, many torturers.
People think torture works because they think that the guilty deserve it. In other words, they want to avenge.
Hence the never-ending rationalization of torture. People want the bad guys to suffer for what they have done.
A long torture represents the worse punishment possible. If the act is bad enough (like 9/11 or rape of a child), many people find it appropriate, and more so if they don't have to do it themselves.
The perpetrators of torture like it. They just need a narrative that justifies it, a narrative they believe in. In that case, quite a large part of us can become torturers if the circumstances put them in the situation.
Many people think that the average Joe would never torture, in any circumstances. It is just untrue. A human just need to be embedded in a group of people which values legitimate violence or torture.
If we have a social support to make it legitimate, most people can do terrible things.
Hence the mobs lynching a suspect - like that guy who was killed in Boston because an online mob pointed him as the perpetrator of the marathon bombs.
Hence the common soldiers of the German Wehrmacht on the eastern front, who participated in the killing of many Jews. The idea that only fanatic Nazis like the Waffen SS or the Einsatzgruppen were involved are just untrue. Many German - who have no issues recognizing their country's responsibilities and atrocities - still can't believe that the average soldier directly participated in the genocide. They did - as historians have demonstrated.
The genocide in Rwanda has also shown that. Most of Hutus' men participated in the genocide of the Tutsis, and most of women either supported it or acted in it.
In a given society in normal circumstances, there will always be people who want violence for itself. Efficiency to solve what the society consider punishable offers the perfect rationalization for their own need to be violent.
If you have an urge to be violent, one can become a cop or join a drug gang. Not that all cops are violent but many are. Many wives of cops or soldiers are beaten by their husband. Sorry to tell harsh truths.
But that can be different. The German police is nowadays known for its specific values. In France, were I live, cops are getting always more violent without any reason for it, just a slow radicalization to far-right ideas and values. More than 60% in the police force now vote for the far-right. This is known through their actual vote when they elect their unions' representatives.
Violence is the norm in most "force institutions" (police, army, intelligence services) in most countries, including democracies. Torture is merely the exacerbation of it in special circumstances where the crime is considered so bad that the uttermost violence is legitimized.
In average, during the XXth century, 90% of casualties during the war were civilians.
When fighting the Germans and the Japanese during WWII, the "good" countries like the USA and the UK went at length to use terror against the civilians - sharing with Hitler the idea that if the people is demoralized by intense bombings, it will force their military to stop the war. Dresden and Tokyo were both bombed with incendiary devices. In Dresden, 130 000 casualties during a sole night, 95% being civilians.
Humans are nor violent nor peaceful by nature. They are social animals who behave according to the current social norms of their social group.
Obama was a splendid President, very respectful of the Constitution - and I gladly voted for him. But he went along with the drone war in Afghanistan, with a large number of collateral casualties. Basically, 5 year-old children of djihadists can legitimately be killed if they happen to be nearby their father when a drone located him. Collateral damages, necessary for the greater good.
The Obamas have become very close to George Bush Jr. They can't stop saying how much a nice guy he is. Except that this guy should be trialed by the International Court of Justice if not by the American legal system for invading and occupying Iraq on fabricated grounds.
How can these super cultivated people and so decent people like the Obamas befriend GWBb Jr? Well, they have been in power as well and that experience has immerged them into the social norms of Washington. Very few are the one capable of keeping a true moral compass while embedded in a specific social class.
I'm no exception to this. I try to be a good guy but I identify myself as the guy in the Star Wars movie who wonders: Are we the baddies?
I am sure after learning this all Americans will take to the streets and after a massive protest the government will defund CIA and prosecute everyone responsible for the related crimes. Right?
And if that doesn't happen, European companies will cancel American accounts, IKEA will close shop here, GOG will refuse to sell games in US, etc, etc. Right?
Because, as I've learned on HN in the last two weeks, all citizens are responsible for what their government is doing, regardless of their knowledge or level of support for the practice.
You don't ever see anything about the invasions of Grenada or Panama, let alone all the murk that the US does with Haiti, heck Puerto Rico is not even a state but a US Caribbean colony, the US used to torture the separatists leaders of Puerto Rico with Radiation
Those of you who work at Amazon, your employer built and operates a special custom, airgapped datacenter at Langley for this organization. When you write library code that makes AWS services better, you also enrich this organization and make them more effective at carrying out these types of operations (like actively hacking into the computers in the US Congress that were used by the congresspeople who provide oversight to the CIA, to delete evidence of torture, getting caught doing the hacking and evidence tampering, and subsequently lying to Congress about the hacking).
Bonkers reading through this thread and seeing people discuss torture as casually and unemotionally as if it were just a regular ol' anyday thing. Like wow folks, this is not academic!
Anything short of libertarian anarchy is a dystopia to these folks. You would actually think that people with a “rationalist” bias would care more about outcomes than elevating deontological ideals above all else but I guess not
Only outcome I see here is the hegemony of the planet abusing brown people simply because it suspected that they could have been dangerous at some point in the past so it tortures them to try and prove how "dangerous" they truly where, but ofc bc torture doesn't even work these poor sods end up with all sorts of health problems or brain damage in this case, and the cia ends up with a notebook full of lies, extracted under torture with which they will use to bomb the shit outta more poor brown people elsewhere
Yeah... "outcomes"
> “Ammar fabricated the information he provided when undergoing EITs,” it said. “He later admitted to his interrogators/debriefers that he was terrified and lied to get agency officers to stop the measures … Ammar also explained that he was afraid to tell a lie and was afraid to tell the truth because he did not know how either would be received.”
I wasn’t talking about the contents of this article, just taking the opportunity to pile in on the libertarians. Their should absolutely be consequences for this
Not sure what this looked like when you posted two hours ago, but all the top posts now are calling this evil, disgusting, awful, and all the bad things.
Glancing through the comments now, I see only maybe one or two that don't overtly and somewhat emotionally condemn this. And those one or two that don't aren't praising it by any means either.
That's great. I don't know if they hid the comments I was referring to or what, but all the top comments at first were these really disgusting academic takes on torture and debating its value. Even for HN – which I often find to be pretty skewed toward the libertarian like others mentioned – it was appalling.
If our country was just, everyone in the CIA who engaged in or authorized torture would be executed. I'm typically against capital punishment, but state sanctioned torture is such a far line past what is acceptable, I really think we'd be better off if we swept all these evil people off the face of the planet.
Instead, they get cushy think tank and consultancy jobs as a reward for their evil 'service'.
What is the clever path to fixing an unaccountable branch of government who keeps secrets from the people meant to oversee it to cover up their egregious acts?
They are effectively a rogue criminal organization with the power of state protection at this point. Making an example of the criminal acts we do have knowledge of seems the only effective recourse short of dismantling the CIA entirely.
I think that literally the only way to dismantle the CIA and other blatantly and obviously criminal portions of the US government without using violence is to spread wide the fact that they are a portion of the government that operates entirely outside of the rule of law, and that we can't be said to actually have the rule of law/democracy/freedom/etc if it doesn't apply equally to everyone.
If enough people shout about the emperor's nakedness enough times, eventually it will jump the gap from something everyone knows, to common knowledge[1] (something everyone knows that everyone knows). They will have to fall into disrepute, and that won't happen by us being quiet about it.
Right now, I think most people in the US think of the US as a place with the rule of law, and equal application thereof. The CIA's well-documented activities illustrate plainly that that is not true. The well-publicized summary executions of unarmed people by the police without trial or jury are getting noticed more often, as well. We can say it in plain words, often, to bring it to the level of common sense.
The vast, vast majority of people would like to live in a place with the rule of law, applied fairly and equally to all people. An even higher percentage would be on board without the rule of law, just so long as no special connected elites get unique treatment and free taxpayer money. This is a big tent.
There will, of course, be a subset of the population at all times that wants gun-toting, black-bag Jack Bauer 007 "license to kill" daddy to run around and exercise their best super reliable adult judgement and eschew the entire time-consuming nonsense of arrest and human rights and trial and just put a blowtorch to the balls of the Completely Obviously Guilty Bad Terrorist Guy immediately, as we have immortalized in so much of our entertainment. But I remain resolute in my belief that those people are a small minority of human beings, and are shrinking every generation. There isn't a month of my life that goes by that I am not beaming proud of the human race that we even gave the fucking nazis full on courtroom trials after WW2. If that doesn't show that we can absolutely get there on a long enough timescale, I don't know what does.
The usual tropes apply:
- sunlight is the best disinfectant
- teach, listen, learn
- treat others as you wish to be treated
- always stand up for the truth
We've been improving for thousands of years. In another few we'll get there yet.
That's a fair perspective, and one I've previously held. However my view of social attitudes is that they almost always follow a bell curve: exposure to extreme positions are how moderates reflect on and revise the status quo. The long tail must move before the centroid can shift.
10% of the population needs to call for the execution of all torturers in the CIA before the zeitgeist's illusion of justice painted over black ops can be dismantled. If radicals only advocated for "CIA is bad and needs to be reigned in" that doesn't create enough cognitive dissonance for the general public to reflect on their attitudes and actually effect change.
Radicals advocating for the superlative solution create cover for moderates to take compromise action.
I think it would be good for society if CIA torturers would be executed, but I'd be shocked if the moderate politicians in power had the courage to actually do so.
I don't think violence actually works to solve the problem, however.
In addition to being barbaric, it also has the tiny problem of being ineffective. You can't execute an ideology, you have to out-meme it.
The concept of an above-the-law class has a long and beloved history because us social human beings seem to really love (and require!) having a very clear and well-defined social hierarchy within which one can orient oneself. Most of us would even prefer clarity about the hierarchy and where one resides within it to elevated position within a murkier hierarchy.
You can't get rid of a monarch just by stripping them of their power and installing a parliament; the poor will keep polishing their crowns and spoons for free until the cows come home. You literally have to construct a better meme to replace the fundamental concept. You'll have to out-James Bond James Bond (and Batman and Superman and Jack Bauer and Jason Bourne and friends).
I used to think that the US constitution was an explicitly fraudulent meme promoted by the ruling class (I think Washington was the largest landowner in the colonies?) to usurp, and maybe it was, but this Lincoln quote made me think a little more deeply about it:
> As a nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' We now practically read it 'all men are created equal, except negroes.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.' When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty – to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.
Even Lincoln pointed out we were full of shit. I suppose he's right that it's better to fake it 'till you make it than to not give a shit at all.
I don't think it is the violence itself that solves the problem. I think it is the broader public realizing that "the CIA is engaging in acts so egregious my countrymen think execution is morally justified" that solves the problem, by forcing them to look for more moderate solutions and prioritize their implementation.
I think 'never advocate for violence, even against more-violent greater evils' is a flawed rule because it leads to the compromise result landed closer to in favor of evil. We need the radical voices to drag the center towards effective action. (And torture is so superlatively evil that I have no moral qualms advocating for the humane execution of those who can be proven to have engaged in or ordered it).
I don't think you persuade the segment of the population that thinks that execution is morally unjustifiable by advocating for morally justified execution, but I'm no sociologist.
That's fair, I think other readers watching us debate whether CIA torture is evil enough that state execution is justified probably has a similar effect to my goals with advocating for it in public discussion... so thanks! Hopefully we've shifted a few minds towards "something needs to be done".
We are already as bad or worse than our enemy by torturing them, covering it up, and using bad information to justify genocide against innocent civilians!
The idea that we are 'above' them is only possible because propaganda and secrecy keeps the horrors of what our country does out of the zeitgeist.
As long as former torturers get to be pundits on TV talk shows, I see no path to fixing this. We need someone courageous and with power to start enforcing the existing laws against these people to the maximum or the problem is only going to get worse.
I think if the US wants to be a global hegemon without having a bankrupt/hypocritical liberal ideology, a good way to start would be with locking up Bush, Cheney, and the rest of the neocons responsible for the Iraq War for a life sentence. Obama, Clinton and the rest of the administration officials responsible for Libya, Syria, and the drone assassination program.
We don't even need to go that far back to prosecute all living presidents (even though in a just world, we would), but this would be a good start. Anything less means that US participation in international institutions like ICJ is just a farce (like how Saudi Arabia has a seat on the UN HRC)
Holy shit. This is nauseating. Why do we tolerate the existence of the US state anymore? What's the point of any of this?
I _hate_ the feeling of the smacking the back of my head. And they did it, against a plywood wall, by gripping a towel wrapped around his neck and slamming him into it, for two hours at a time, just to 'train' people.
Everyone involved - perpetrators and victims - needs therapy and rehabilitation.
The assailants need to sit down and apologize to this guy if they are ever going to be healthy humans again.
The use cases of a single government having domain over such a large land mass, when 50 smaller states are already defined and functioning, are dwindling amidst the information age.
The crimes described in this article are utterly intolerable. Nobody wants this.
...isn't the whole idea of such "back sites" that once anyone gets into them, they are NEVER getting out alive?
Torture and atrocities asside, I'd imagine most organized crime syndicates run tighter ships (eg. the standard dissolve the bodies of torture victims + kill the "torture service providers" too at regular intervals then re-recruit new ones etc.) ...this seem so beyond sloppy it's clearly a political s throwing play.
Organized crime torturing people makes for an interesting TV show plot but in reality it's the exception. Kidnapping and torture carry far harsher penalties than most other (vastly more profitable) crimes. If mobsters want information they usually just pay for it. Money is the best tool for convincing people to betray their convictions and break promises. What was the old saying again? Thirty pieces of silver?
The difference is the CIA doesn't care about making money. They're secret police gone wild. They have no financial, legal or moral constraints, and the results were wholly predictable.
I thought the same. But maybe they just do (have) not care. History has shown that the US can do all sorts of horrendous things and nothing ever seems to happen...
"History has shown that the US can do all sorts of horrendous things and nothing ever seems to happen..."
Well, nothing except:
1 - make lots of enemies
2 - make the world a more dangerous place
3 - lose the moral high ground and the respect of people/countries who might have otherwise been friends
These things have consequences... measured in American lives (which are, sadly, the only kind of lives some people care about)... but also in many other lives.
>These things have consequences... measured in American lives (which are, sadly, the only kind of lives some people care about)... but also in many other lives.
If we have learned anything from the past 2 years, its not even all American lives. Some American lives are treated with utmost care while others barely register a blip on their radar.
Honestly, that’s the worst part of it. Sometimes people need to die and ugly things need to happen, but our overreliance on these means and how frankly unquiet our “quiet work” is is just sickening. I don’t know what’s involved in this kind of work, but if these are our best I’m very disappointed.
>The interrogators were convinced that Baluchi knew more than he was saying because he was a nephew of the self-proclaimed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, Khaled Sheikh Mohammed.
Repressive regimes often make a point of persecuting family members. It sends the message that resistance will cause terrible things to happen to those you love, not just you. The torture works toward that end in this case.
It almost makes one wonder if there is no such thing as a regime that isn't "repressive", given that the one most loudly trumpeting the rule of law and righteousness engages in the exact same blatantly criminal acts as all of the other ones they like to vilify as being without the rule of law. There are precisely zero states that have the power to torture with impunity that don't use it to, well, torture with impunity. It's a decades old running gag and common TV trope in the US-and-A that you'll get raped in prison if you get locked up. Everyone truly knows that the concept of equal protection under the law is just a joke, but we keep on as if the emperor were fully clothed.
Now that we've got a real honest-to-goodness war (with associated war crimes) happening in the only region of this planet that seemed at present to have a snowball's chance in hell of actually maintaining peace and human rights, I'm beginning to wonder if large groups of humans are even capable of actually having, you know, a civilization.
It's not lookin' good. I will remain pathologically optimistic, however.
I think it’s worth noting that the United States has not won a war since the CIA was formed. They seem a useless liability that gives us a bad name.
Perhaps we should move intelligence work back under the domain of the military, how it was before 1941. We could put the marines in charge of the CIA’s mission, that mission being expeditionary intelligence (and not torturing people on black sites).
And isn't it ironic that a US citizen is currently laying low in Putin's Moscow, of all places, because he does not expect a fair or humane treatment from the US judicial system over his alleged "crimes".
Obama ran for office on a pledge to close Guantanamo, and he could have done so by executive order. He didn't, and that should tell you all you need to know about the nature of the American presidency.
There was a HUGE faction in congress (they go by a name that rhymes with schmepublicans) that would have punished him severely if he had done that. The presidency is not as all-powerful as some people think it is, sometimes this is good, sometimes not so much.
When President Obama took office, Democrats controlled both the House and Senate. You can't hang this one on Republicans. Both parties were equal participants in keeping the Guantanamo detention facility open.
Congress sets the annual federal budget. The Democrat controlled Congress literally allocated dollars to run that facility. If Democrats actually wanted to close it they could have eliminated funding, but they specifically chose to keep it multiple times.
Early in a new President's first term, "I promised over and over to do X while I was running for President, and the American People very clearly voted for that" is d*mn good political cover for doing X.
There was an opportunity for Obama to have a much more effective and bipartisan presidency early on. It wouldn't have been a friendly relationship, but certainly a more effective government. He rammed Obamacare through Congress very early in his presidency and that pretty much removed his ability to do anything else in his first term.
There was good faith negotiation about the plan. It was very close to what the Republican plan was. The problem was that Mitch McConnell stated publicly that he was going to block everything that Obama did. The Republicans blocked stimulus funding. To claim that the failure of bipartisanship was Obama's is to ignore the facts as stated by the Republicans at the time.
Also, and I'm really not trying to be snarky, that statement sounds like something the child of abusive parents would say. If only Obama had been quiet, they would've left him alone. That's a no-win situation, I think.
I'm answering your question by suggesting that Obama could have gotten much more done if he had not been so extremely partisan from day 1. When it became clear he was not going to negotiate any changes to the monumental Obamacare law and pass it through on a partisan vote, the only natural response for Republicans seeking to effect their own policy agenda was to block as much as possible. In effect Obama, rather than choosing a 90/10 or 80/20 ratio of democrat to republican polciies to be passed, said there was no point in allowing any republican policies through. And so the only natural response was for Republicans, as the minority, to respond in kind until the next election.
A more mathematical explanation would be that if every law was 80% Democrat policy and you were able to pass 100 policies a term, you could get 80 of your policies through in a single term. You might think getting 100% of every policy in a bill would be better but that might mean you only get to pass 50 policies a term because of increased partisan tensions. Even at 100% that's only 50 Democrat policies instead of 80.
I'm sorry, but you're ignoring the actual things that happened. There were good faith negotiations with the Republicans about Obamacare and post-crash stimulus and the Republicans chose to unanimously vote against them because they saw a partisan advantage to doing so.
I'm not ignoring anything. Obama was successful in his first year, in part because of how much effort he put into being bipartisan. He did not have much success in getting Republicans to vote for his massive landmark policies, but his Supreme Court nominee sailed through confirmation.
Generally, Republicans were very engaged in solving problems in the first year, but faced the reality of a democrat supermajority. Obama made many concessions in the bills he passed despite not getting many Republicans to vote.
There's nothing inconsistent there with a contentious but effective government. Sure it would be nice to have gotten more Republicans to vote yes, but the process was working.
After he passed Obamacare, in which he abandoned all negotiations with Republicans and flexed his supermajority power, the only appropriate response was stonewalling.
Punished him how? Were the schmepublicans not already turning up the drama dial to 11? What further recourse did they have to make things worse for him?
I think that the CIA carries a lot of value for sitting presidents. The organization gives them a lot of power, similar to the military but with less accountability. So far we haven't seen a president that was willing to give up that power for any reason of simple morality. There is something appealing about being able to send an organization out to kill, steal, and spy for you with zero accountability.
I don't think the CIA would need to or even be able to blackmail a sitting president. They are too busy being his second most powerful tool. Like a really good hunting dog. It doesn't matter if it bites some peasants so long as he does a good job for its master.
We most certainly did see a president who was willing to give up that power to destroy the CIA, and they killed him in public to make sure everyone got the message.
Presumably bogantech is thinking of the likes of J. Edgar Hoover - who had his federal agency spy on political leaders, and "amassed a great deal of power and was in a position to intimidate and threaten others, including multiple sitting presidents of the United States." according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Edgar_Hoover
Jeffrey Epstein. Do you think it was coincidence that he had power of attorney over Les Wexner, who was involved with the notorious Southern Air Transport? There are many other intelligence connections, for instance Maxwell and her father.
The CIA is really the worst institution in the US government.
Obviously, the (mountains of) circumstantial evidence suggests some sort of intelligence connection, with Maxwell's father having known ties to MI6, Mossad and even the KGB. But I don't think you'd be able to run around bribing billionaires like Leon Black under the guise of "tax advice" without the US authorities' involvement.
Also, Southern Air Transport was a CIA front company.
A president was recently elected that had more viable blackmail material released about him than any previous president and instead of launching missiles into Sudan like Clinton did a couple days after his scandal, he just slid past it.
> A president was recently elected that had more viable blackmail material released about him than any previous president and instead of launching missiles into Sudan like Clinton did a couple days after his scandal, he just slid past it.
I'm not sure how a scandal during one presidency is comparable in your example to scandals that happened before a presidency. Further, you might recall that there was a 'strategic strike' attack in Africa as well as a contentious immigration ban in the first weeks of the Trump presidency, which, if I am following your logic, would actually suggest an attempt to distract from unsavory past deeds.
The Sudan+Afghanistan thing was two days after the scandal broke. I am curious if there were any similar actions by any of the following presidents but launching stuff right after entering office doesn't appear to be the same kind of action.
(Perhaps there is another cynical explanation for the Africa thing but it is probably not to distract from an, as you say, decades-old scandal.)
One of my friends from college is now a Poli Sci professor. He researched the effectiveness of “wag the dog” techniques and found that they were ineffective. I don't think his paper on the topic is available online though.
How long do you think the CIA would remain as a legitimate organization if something like that happened? All it would take is one public statement by a president that CIA had threatened them and the organization would come down like a house of cards. The entire leadership would be in handcuffs and trying to explain away treason to the FBI who would happily hand them over to military intelligence organizations to rendition their asses to their own prisons.
There are tons of competing military intelligence organizations that would be happy to take over from there. The CIA as we know it would cease to exist in a matter of days.
Given that most presidents have huge egos that is a huge gamble for the CIA. All it takes is one tape to get out and then you've just started a civil war.
Blackmail is for mid-level aspiring politicians who get bigger than their britches. A presidential candidate is a smiling face that carries the decision-makers' platform.
They are all part of the same system, a system which has only the trappings of a democracy, but in no practical sense is the government from the people, by the people to the people. It is just a giant gang warfare between warring plutocratic and bureaucratic factions. Trump, Biden, Bush, Obama. They all tortured, they all bombed, they all let people die without healthcare while spending billions in the biggest military machine of the world, for "defense".
It is about time people wake up and stop letting those criminals divide us in their fictional turfs.
Well considering the Biden administration, like the Trump administration before it, said the information should not be disclosed because it would do significant harm to national security. The mention of national security makes me think the issue here is multi faceted.
National security is not a get-out-of-democracy-free card. There has to be some way for public opinions about the CIA to loop back around to the congresspeople on the security council, otherwise the system won't work.
The likely possibilities are, they all agree it’s necessary for reasons we don’t understand so they condone it—or, the power of the executive branch is diffuse and doesn’t always emanate from the Oval Office. I.e., the so called deep state, career bureaucracy and momentum hold more sway.
Indifference to Reality - All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. ... Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage – torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians – which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side.
A neuropsychologist carried out an MRI of Baluchi’s head in late 2018 and found “abnormalities indicating moderate to severe brain damage” in parts of his brain, affecting memory formation and retrieval as well as behavioral regulation. The specialist found that the “abnormalities observed were consistent with traumatic brain injury.”
Awful. I kind of wonder if this ignorance extends to training their own field agents at The Farm where they do mock torture. Unlike Hollywood, taking a few blows to the head tends to be deleterious rather than toughening one up. Potentially even disabling or fatal.
Those students must have been real proud that they passed the exam with high marks. Now I wonder what type of exams are designed for the drone operators.
How come the article is not naming who was doing the torturing, and does not mention anynothing regarding attempting to contact the office of the US Attorney General to ask why no criminal charges have been filed?
Making the post as anon. I fully support the CIA to use torture even on US Citizens. If you're caught planning a terror attack or something similar that could cause mass loss of life, torture is a reasonable last resort to extract information from a suspect
Sure, but this guy wasn't caught planning anything, he was just a rando family member and as the article mentions the cia itself already assessed that was the case, that he wasn't a danger
Yet they decided to use him as a training dummy anyway, why? Because the cia is just fucking evil and it ought have been disbanded in the 1960s with JFK
Anyhow, what I just wish is that more world powers had their own CIAs and dedicated themselves to hunt down and kill US cia agents as needed to defend their national sovereignty and population
The US doesn't understand anything but violence, I just wish there were more tools to deter the US from using it, forcing it to a dialogue table, terrorist country.
Make no mistake, no US citizen outside of the political class benefits from this or other atrocities. The exact same goes for the surveillance programs.
Losing the moral high ground degrades the whole society.
The whole anti establishment movement rallies around stuff like this. The lefties and the right-wingers will be after different things but they will be able to come together on the hypocritical stance and corruption of the current system. It unites enemies against you who think that the most important thing is to bring down the current horrible governance and figure out things later.