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A Thread for the Senate Report on CIA Torture
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Over the course of human history humanity has been terrible to each other, don't look back in history if you want to see humanity at its finest. We're meant to be better than the ape primitives we're descended from. It's progress, not regression. Torture's definitely an issue to get upset about today. What's worse is that torture by itself was bad enough, they couldn't even do that properly - that's how incompetent they were. Which isn't a surprise from W.'s administration, whose true purpose goes beyond protecting the country for its own good - that was PR spin, they were racists that wanted to torture and kill foreigners that weren't like them.
In America? We're not doing that right now since we have a Democrat who refuses to torture in the White House. W. wasn't anomaly in the GOP, actually he'd be considered too wimpy for the present GOP. If the Republicans get another president we'll be right back where we started and since none of the people responsible were punished they'll be back in government doing what they do best.
So why don't we do something about it to make that happen rather than sit on our hands when evil shit is done in our name? The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
Keep in mind the answer can't be "vote for decent human beings on election day" because that's already a given.
Considering 24 was made by Fox I wouldn't put it past Murdock made the show to influence the public on torture. He was very much behind how bad the media being worse here and the UK.
Write your representatives at both levels. Organize campaigns to do the same. Pressure potential candidates to make promises, and pressure the winner to keep them. Run for office even. Get more involved than just voting.
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That is uh...pretty out of line. I think W'd administration was callous and indifferent to a lot of things and quite guilty of an ends justify the means mentality, but calling them a bunch of racists looking to kill foreigners is bit much, and just serves to kill any conversation on the topic. You get the sense that even Cheney thought what he was doing was for the good of country in his own twisted way.
Non sequitur.
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No possibility of winning, of course. Even though most of the districts and regions we had polled in support of the candidate, due to the way districts were drawn for every moderate and population dense area we have 80% rural or hyper conservative areas. Despite the city we were running in, by poll and by city ordinance, being totally for the candidates we worked with not a single one could win due to the fact that Florida campaign districts are so horribly designed (and only have gotten worse since then, years back). The city voting districts, as an aggregate, were mostly (about 75%) for our candidates. But broken into 8 districts like a bizzare pinwheel stretching out for miles into the countryside... well its not uncommon across most of the country.
I don't have much faith in grassroots activism because of that. You have to have either money or established power to make change, in my eyes.
I'm telling you what the problem is , I don't know the solution unfortunately. The government is compromised but that in no way makes what's happening ok because it's hard to change. Change is hard, change is necessary, it's a bit silly to tell people to stop worrying about the torture because humanity's been worse in the past. While we are better than we were, we've not perfect. To fix the government would require enormous time and resources to block the interests that maintain the status quo and rebuild the government into en entity that won't won't torture.
Not that closing Guantanimo would do anything meaningful now*. That should have been done while W. was in office when they were being tortured, no what is required is to find every piece of garbage in the government responsible, put them on trial and if they're guilty give them sentences so harsh their grandchildren will feel it. Oh, and maybe burning down the CIA SHIELD style and rebuild it/start from scratch wouldn't be a bad idea either.
* it needs to be done to destroy what it represents and free the prisoners still there, neither is going to fix the American goverbment torturing
I'm also a realist who thinks you have to work with the government you got rather than the government you wish you had. If this sort of thing is to stop its going to either need to be backed by a major industry as detrimental to their purposes or through widespread vilification through mass media. The media thing doesn't look like it's going to happen, so the best bet to actually get torture banned as such would be to find some corporate interest that can profit off the lawsuit and legal standings and push them into attack mode.
I agree we have to work with the government we have, I don't agree that getting a corporate interest alone will do that. The problem goes deeper than that, it's entrenched at various government and corporate levels. It's going to take enormous lengths to stop torture from happening again and anything less will delay it at best, do nothing at worst.
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And it was always the effort of decades or generations, not years.
Fortune cookie idioms are all well and good, but no 3rd party political force has gained more than 20% of the electorate for the last 100 years. The parties are centuries old, their positions well over 50 years old, and both are only getting more set in their ways. The effort required to raise a movement on this topic to civil rights movement levels would be staggeringly exponential compared to the 1960s, not only because torture is a nebulous and typically non-day to day problem for most Americans but also because the media engines are massively more expensive to change bias than historically.
I can believe that something like the Ferguson protests and the rampant police abuses across the country might (hopefully) lead to change through populist momentum, but torture has no chance of doing so without buckets of cash to make people aware, afraid, and willing to act for things beyond their communities. Even the momentum from the Ferguson protests (the latest of many similar across the country) are being strongly resisted by media and politicians on both sides of the isle (though mostly Republicans), making change not assured and probably not going to be something that happens in the red states where it is actually needed.
The problems that you have described running into (gerrymandering) cannot be fixed by 'buckets of money'. Run all of the high production ads you like in a district that's calcified into a partisan straight ticket party stronghold - it will not change the voter base. I'm also rather skeptical that the solution to democratic problems in the west is clearly to put our trust in private interest groups.
At any rate, I don't see how this is germane to a conversation about the CIA torture report.
Especially with a potential fundraising change in the spending deal that could allow the super rich to contribute super more. Average people are even more out of the game and unable to affect change on topics like this.
At any rate, regarding realist expectations:
I want President Obama to fire some people. The folks writing the condescending op eds that clearly have no respect for the offices they're supposed to be beholden to? Fire them. Anyone still working for the intelligence agencies that speak-up about this without strongly condemning it? Fired. People who still work for the agency that were involved in the program? Fired.
This is setting the bar really, really low. There is plenty of precedent for firing persons that hold such contempt for the executive branch, it's easy to use firings as a political scapegoat while business as usual continues, etc. It's also something that President Obama can do without requiring anyone else's cooperation.
Firing them the first day in office would have had similar results. There is no perfect counter measure against blow back, which is why it's important for the CIA not to have elements in its personnel that will do anything with no conscience, it's the CIA not Nikita's Division. Firing won't solve everything, but it will do something and the CIA needs to be drastically change who works for it because right now they can't be fully trusted and aren't accountable. When operatives care more about being assholes then being loyal to the country this is what you get. Yes, there will be serious blow back for firing, that's unavoidable. It's unacceptable the president must be extorted by rogue government employees who think they're immune to consequences no matter whose in the White House.
That's actually not true, or it is only true if you narrow the time frame so that it is. Not only have political parties fallen in and out of favor, but each party has had drastic changes of what they push, as far as policy.
Also, 100 years is nothing. We like to think it is because we're a young country, but 100 years isn't even long enough to come to terms with the world as it exists today. Politics takes decades to move and it isn't going to get easier as the years progress and people live longer.
A reminder that this man was canned for bogus reasons back in 2002, and unofficially for "being too nice".
I have many ideas, none are what America is going to take seriously. That's how fucked we are with the CIA.
Now that is a real man.
Too real for his superiors, I guess.
I mean the service members working there probably were doing so under some shitty conditions.
But I can accurately guess that because several years after that detainee guards were still working under some shitty conditions.
So I won't pretend that firing him over that was in any way genuine.
Elaborate please.
1. Firing the torturers from the CIA
2. Investigating and putting the torturers on trial for their crimes
3. Disbanding the CIA entirely, and either rebuilding it again or starting a new agency
Then you probably weren't looking in the right places. Think about jokes about pound-me-in-the-ass prison. People are very often pretty ok with inflicting horrible suffering on people they think have done something wrong.
Have any quotations from before 2001?
1 and 2 aren't addressing hiring practices. If you want to talk about hiring practices, I'd like to know what exactly you would change. Right now, CIA hires a variety of people from a variety of backgrounds and with varied educations, from newly graduated college students to analysts with doctorates or graduate degrees and real world experience, and everything in between (sometimes without college depending on military background and experience). The hiring process is already pretty long and involved, so what would you add or change about it?
3 is where I have to disagree. You can talk about disbanding CIA entirely, but that would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. While this specific situation is fucked up, you would be throwing away decades of experience and knowledge.
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The CIA currently fills an extremely important role. They're just apparently also very bad at it.
There is no baby in that bathwater. The CIA has been acting like a state within a state, mostly catering to right-wing ideologues, for decades. The 'experience and knowledge' is tainted at best, with even the best analysts clearly bent towards providing bullet points for partisan actors to use rather than engaging in investigation. At worst, the CIA's hiring practice amounts to hiring friends of friends, and reaching out to the right wing tough guy crowd in search of violent people.
People have mentioned the KGB in the thread already, but I think that serves as a better contrast than a comparison: the CIA was always more into the 'hit guy with wrench until he spills the beans' sort of methodology, which has never quite produced the results they wanted & led them to lagging far behind eastern Europe in terms of intelligence gathering despite being much better funded than their adversaries. The KGB tried that out, found it worked well for shutting up dissidents at home but not so well for gathering intelligence, and just sent out young girls to lick the faces of the misogynistic nerds that the CIA built itself on. All that hardcore super masculine SERE training, and all it took for agents to get compromised was a good blowjob.
I think either method is abhorrent, and I think spying in general is incredibly unethical, but if you're all for it as a means to some greater good's end then I have to wonder why you'd take the CIA's side. It's an institute that's never been good at it's job (or, at the very least, not as good at it's job as it's contemporaries).
If you want a good spy agency, rebuilding from the ground up is almost certainly the way to go (but lolz, no, this will not actually happen ever. The Washington boy's club pretty much revolves around the super manly and incredibly badass CIA).
Good. If they were only in it for the opportunity to serve themselves rather than serve the public, you probably wouldn't want them in there anyway, regardless of their talent.