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A Thread for the Senate Report on CIA Torture
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We don't have a democracy, and the system we have has worked ok for a long while with no accountability for our leadership since the beginning. A great way to see this is through John Greene's Crash Course US History, one of his focuses is pointing out how essentially unchanging our government has been for the last 300 years. It improves slightly over time as far as representation goes, but that's more to do with the rich and powerful getting more diverse than the political machine changing.
The type of politicians you are talking about cannot make it into national office without spending a massive fortune (a la Ross Perot, and he didn't even win). Locally you can get good people into municipal and occasionally state government, but to make it on a federal level you need to be massively bankrolled and people who take rational, righteous actions based on morality rather than business interests don't get funding.
I just...
People either don't care or support the torture done. Everything is just political football where "i have to support every action of my party because there is no worse enemy than my poltical opposite."
Just pack it in folks, we lost.
And regarding prosecution in other countries: When Milan station chief Lady was arrested in Panama after being being tried in italy for abduction, instead of being extradited to taly, he was let go a day later.
Yeah...let's not go supporting trials in abscentia.
Wasn't the UN the creation of England and The United States after World War II? If so, it should not shock anyone why the International Courts, would just talk about trying the US for War Crimes and then totally brush it aside to go after poorer countries themselves.
Boy, Truman sure didn't expect the CIA to be the monster that it is today.
Don't be so dramatic. It's not like it has ever been any different over the course of human history. People care about things they actually experience. Torture is small and far away and the most people really understand it is that it happens to people who are not like them that they are told are planning on harming them. Othering is a constant and negative thing, but it isn't anything new.
The fact that mass executions, open torture at all levels of governance, and other such commonalities in the past are getting less and less over time should be cause to celebrate, even though the bad is still occuring. Torture is happening, yes, but not on levels in the hundreds rather than hundreds of thousands. Is it ideal? No. Is it better than even 100 years ago? Absolutely.
Hopefully in another hundred years it will be down to a dozen or so. It won't every fully go away though. Some people in power are really shitty and evil, as opposed to simply self serving like the majority.
Enough good people in state legislatures can tell the federal government to sit down, shut up, and do as they say, but the bar is pretty high. Seems a more likely route to campaign reform than changes from Congress, sadly.
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Its sad that the good legislatures, will have their careers destroyed by the "Status Quo", for whistleblowing. If you want to be a politician and are not in the good graces of Corporate America, you are dead to rights.
The ICC only has jurisdiction over nations that have ratified it. The US has not ratified it.
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
That seems overly generous.
Most comments I've seen on and off the news just assume torture works and has produced good intel.
lots of people care. and there are many who clearly would care but have ended up on the cultural/ political side of things where they're on the defensive and acting like assholes about the whole thing.
mostly it's just that our system of government makes it impossible for anything to get done without basic unanimity.
And there was a time when I thought torture being evil was a unanimously held view.
Execution isn't seen as being evil, unanimously.
Bad people suffering isn't seen as being evil, unanimously.
I don't know where you got the idea that torture was seen as evil, unanimously.
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
Capital punishment is in no way comparable to torture; and while I strongly disagree with the arguments for it, they are at least morally defensible and predicated on due process of law and a humane execution.
And I got the idea from our centuries of law, jurisprudence, treaty obligations, and, until now, universal condemnation from leaders across the political spectrum.
It's not a stretch to think people would be marginally ok with bad people who are dangerous and evil and those other people being tortured as far as a vague question goes.
But if you ask most people "do you think a police confidential informant providing willing information about a crime ring should be allowed to be tazed repeatedly until death by the police to get a bit more information" they will likely be mostly or uniformly against it. It's all a matter of phrasing the question.
Most people are against torture, but pro security. How you ask the question will determine how people respond.
And they are in no way comparable to torturing people I mean I never want to die, but I'll take being incinerated over being tortured every fucking day of the week.
pleasepaypreacher.net
The good: it's obviously torture and Congress was right to condemn it. Stopped clock, twice a day, etc.
The bad: the report is a biased view that endangered America etc.
The crazy: we should stop blaming Bush for the failures of this administration. "This administration," that almost immediately shut the program down after taking office.
pleasepaypreacher.net
pleasepaypreacher.net
Yeah they literally can't do anything about it unless the UN Security Council steps in. Given that the US would simply veto such a decision the UN and the ICC can do nothing.
The ICC isn't composed of members working for their own country. It is arguably more independent than the UN. And while the US is powerful blatantly ignoring international laws it has agreed to is a bad pr and diplomatic move.
Which is why not ratifying the treaty in the first place is what they did. Why sign a treaty if you're going to try to get out from under it the first instance it might affect you?
They are being compared because drone strikes were seen by the CIA as a useful replacement for indefinite detention following the Guantanamo leaks.
There is also the legal argument that the United States couldn't ratify the treaty without a Constitutional Amendment.
Which would make it come down to the Supreme Court ruling if their rulings could be superseded by an international court, and the ratification would most likely be overturned 9-0 with a 'fuck you, don't punt this to us' (i.e. pass a god damned Amendment and take the heat).
They've watched too much 24. That's the literal justification for a lot of them.
[ed] durr, me good with names
It's still a lazy comparison. Torture was used to in theory extract info (even though it failed at that) drone strikes are used to blow people up we don't like and is again a continuation of what we already did for years. Cruise missiles and targeted bombings.
pleasepaypreacher.net
If NCIS Los Angelas were real the entire country would be on fire at all times. But this is what we are exposed to media style. And while it is for entertainment it is also how we think of concepts like torture and violence and such when these terms come up, mostly because it is the only exposure most people see.
So, when someone hears CIA torturing terrorists, they think Jack Bauer. They think that there is a clear danger to the country. They think these supposed terrorists are Very Bad people who, if given the chance, will do horrible things. They don't think of them as random people who may have shared coffee or were college roomates that one time with a guy who, years later after his wife died in a US airstrike, went radical and bombed an embassy.
Brennan's hire is among the President's worst and most disappointing decisions.
Torture was seen as part and parcel of indefinite detention.
http://blogs.cfr.org/zenko/2013/04/07/why-did-the-cia-stop-torturing-and-start-killing/
And the CIA hadn't been using cruise missiles or bombings. They had pretty much been out of the targeted killing business since the Church committee.
NSFW
This is unspeakable. If someone wants to martyr themselves on the field of battle, fine, but to force a captured prisoner to defile themselves in an attempt to destroy their religious beliefs is Iron Curtain secret-police evil.
Mostly it's just declaring that the 500 page summary is a waste of money and that Feinstein is a hypocrite, without speaking to any of the actual contents of the summary. Also that the report is full of Democrat lies, without mentioning which specific parts are actually the lies or offering any substantial rebuttal at all to try and set these apparently falsehoods straight.
What the everloving fuck
Fucking monsters
But it was totally not a Christian crusade, that last foray into the Persian Gulf.
The problem with drone strikes is that they're attacking people on foreign soil without a declaration of war or the consent of the country it is taking place in.
People in these countries affected by US drone strikes have come to fear blue skies because drones might be flying above them and they could be killed for nothing so much as being near (within a block) a suspected terrorist. They welcome rainy days because drones won't fly in bad weather.
http://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/cheney-calls-international-ban-torture-reports
Wait is this just a funny magazine? It can't be real... I just re-read it...nvm its just satire. I are dumb.