It would actually be in the U.S.'s own interests to prosecute these CIA agents and their superiors.
First, this would show support for international laws against torture and help put the lid back on Pandora's box. This would directly reduce the probability of captured U.S. citizens being tortured. No, that probably does not include those captured by ISIL, but are rogue terrorist organizations all U.S. citizens will need to worry about both now and in the future?
Second, it would close a dangerous precedent. Prosecuting those who committed illegal acts, even though they were assured of immunity, sends a clear message that individuals are still responsible for their actions. Without this sense of individual responsibility U.S. agencies will be capable of utterly anything and, the way things work, capability becomes reality more often than not. Most Americans would sleep better knowing that the NSA's workers are accountable to the law rather than immune to it if their superiors say so, as is currently the case due to the precedent set by the CIA.
Third, the implications for future diplomacy are a nightmare if the U.S. does nothing. There will be no moral high ground for the U.S. to stand on if the U.S. refuses to seek justice.
Finally, it's the right thing to do. The U.S. could set an example for others to follow. To do nothing does precisely the opposite.
> Prosecuting those who committed illegal acts, even though they were assured of immunity, sends a clear message that individuals are still responsible for their actions.
They weren't really offered immunity, they were assured by the Office of Legal Counsel that they were doing something legal. Get bad advice from your lawyer as to what is legal and what isn't, go commit a crime, and see what happens.
For a counterpoint, you might want to look into Argentina's "Law of due obedience"[1]. Of course, Argentinean law doesn't affect US law, but the fact that this law was eventually repealed sets an international precedent that "I was just following orders" is not a valid defense from prosecution.
"I was just following orders" has already been established as an insufficient defense in the 1946 Nuremberg trials and essentially all later trials against WW 2 war criminals. It is by now pretty well established that crimes against humanity in general and torture in particular are not justifiable.
This (along with striving to get good PR) is one of the main reasons the US government is so keen to redefine the word "torture" to mean something that they don't do. The same goes for the words "terrorism" and "terror".
"Shock and awe" == good
"Terror" == bad
"Torture" == illegal
"Stress position" == legal
decapitation with a knife == horrific and evil
decapitation by shrapnel == worthy of a medal
assassination by the American govt == good
assassination by other governments == bad
killing by poison gas on the battlefield == bad
killing by poison injections in a prison == good
What about when it is combined with duress? Like if you refused once and were told they would kill your family if you ever refused again or quit? I'm just curious. I agree with the spirit of the idea that following orders is not valid justification, but being under duress is a well-known and generally accepted justification for committing a crime. Can you shed any extra light on this?
War criminals who would have been shot for abandoning their posts (almost all of the low-level guys fall into that category) have been, and continue to be, prosecuted for those crimes. It's not a hypothetical, it's still in the news.
Yes, there is no amnesty for human right crimes, that means those people were only protected inside Argentina. And the Nuremberg defense doesn't work against the Nuremberg laws.
On a side note, it was not exactly repealed, because you can't repeal an amnesty (ie voting a new law that removes it). They found that its creation was unconstitutional, meaning that it was void from the onset, like it had never happened. Learning about those 2 laws (+ley de pounto final for the ones giving the orders) when I was in Argentina was extremely formative on a law doctrine point of view.
> Get bad advice from your lawyer as to what is legal and what isn't, go commit a crime, and see what happens.
I should start out by saying that I hope the torturers, their superiors, and enablers are prosecuted by anyone that can get their hands on them: a future US administration, the ICC, a European nation, anyone.
That said the US legal analysis is very tough. The lawyers they were given "bad" advice by weren't just lawyer, they were representatives of the sovereign that would seek to prosecute them. That raises due process concerns that aren't present in an ordinary advice-of-counsel defense.
In addition to Constitutional problems, the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 and Military Commissions Act of 2006 create statutory defenses for torturers. The key language is "it shall be a defense that such officer, employee, member of the Armed Forces, or other agent did not know that the practices were unlawful and a person of ordinary sense and understanding would not know the practices were unlawful. Good faith reliance on advice of counsel should be an important factor, among others, to consider in assessing whether a person of ordinary sense and understanding would have known the practices to be unlawful." To be sure, that's not a unlimited immunity provision, but it does make prosecution more difficult. The Military Commissions Act also changed the substantive provisions 18 U.S. Code § 2441 (war crimes) to make much less conduct qualify.
Finally, except in cases where torture resulted in death, there are statute of limitation problems. Depending on which statute is use the limitation period for non-fatal torture or war crimes generally are either five or eight years.
In sum, there are many barriers to US prosecution. It may be much more practical for the wrongdoers to be prosecuted under the international law regime that began at Nuremberg. Given universal jurisdiction for violations of jus cogens this can happen in any country in the world, and there is no statute of limitations doctrine internationally.
Good point about the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 and Military Commissions Act of 2006. I'm not so sure about the good faith reliance on advice of counsel thing, however, for the obvious reasons. The torturers and the OLC are part of the same chain of command...
As a practical matter I don't currently see the political will for prosecutions. If the public demanded it, maybe, but frankly I think a lot of the public feels complicit, in many cases unapologetically so. That all makes me very sad and I do hope these people start slipping up and travelling overseas...
The real reason is that they were carrying out the official policy of the US government. Just calling it CIA torture is minimizing how far up this went. Bush ordered it. DOD knew. DOJ not only knew, it crafted the governments tortured definition of torture. Congress knew.
This isn't some off the books CIA wet team opp. It was planned and signed off at the highest levels. John Yoo, who wrote the torture memos, is a professor at Berkeley. That's how mainstream this was.
Furthermore, the people signed off on it. Not just through our Congressional representatives. Not just because we re-elected the politicians who did it. The public supported it directly. We've known for a long what was going on.
Prosecuting only the people who carried out the orders is cowardly.
You'd have to try Bush, Cheney, Gonzales, a bunch of high ranking DOD and DOJ officials, a bunch of Generals and other officers, Congressional leadership from that era, and former CIA directors too.
"Just following orders" didn't work at Nuremberg because we were trying the people who gave the orders too.
> "Just following orders" didn't work at Nuremberg because we were trying the people who gave the orders too.
The only reason the Nuremberg trails happened at all, was that Germany lost. No-one was indited over fire-bombing Dresden, or nuking Hiroshima. People didn't go to prison over atrocities committed in Vietnam.
While there should be prosecution over this, it seems unlikely to happen in the current US system. I'm not holding my breath, but with the continuing unrest in the country, there might be some actual changes in the coming years. But a lot would need to happen -- for example there's the need for a viable political power-block other than the Democrats and the Republicans -- I sadly don't see that happening any time soon.
"William Laws Calley, Jr. (born June 8, 1943) is a former United States Army officer found guilty of murdering 22 unarmed South Vietnamese civilians in the My Lai Massacre on March 16, 1968, during the Vietnam War. After several reductions, Calley’s original sentence of life in prison was turned into an order of house arrest, but after three years, President Nixon reduced his sentence with a presidential pardon."
Low-level grunt takes a bullet for the team, during one of the most revolutionary periods in American history. There were some low-level prosecutions (and even convictions) of American even during the Iraq war. But the higher-ups were never held accountable.
How could they have known what the people they command do? They could never possibly even dream of doing anything wrong, and if they did, they always did it in the best interests of those they lead and governed. And if it was illegal, well, they'll make it legal; and if convicted, the conviction will be overturned on appeal, or you'll get pardoned.. unless you piss off the wrong man in power. Then you could get shot in the face, and made to apologize for being in the way of the gun.
I meant in the sense of the Nuremberg trials, but still: I stand corrected, thank you. I think the sibling comments illustrates the point I was trying to make.
Also, I don't think election votes can ever count as approval; Congress has approval ratings nearing single digits yet incumbents usually get re-elected.
> The public supported it directly. We've known for a long what was going on.
We know what goes on in North Korea too but that doesn't mean we approve.
And the US is under ubiquitous NSA surveillance, along with domestic propaganda now legalized. Given this, I think the US people are, if anything, being subjugated by the government, not conspiring with it.
24 is a terrifically evil show and helped sell torture by showing Jack routinely torture people and get the right actionable information every time without any ramifications.
That always ruined shows for me. They punch someone, they say nothing. They punch them again, and they immediately give them the truth and stop the torture. But they can't check the truth for quite a while, possibly not without killing or letting the suspect go.
Since we're talking about fiction... In Burn Notice, they routinely stop people from using torture to try to get actionable intel, because "people will say whatever they think you want to hear, just to make it stop"
Even worse, "Madam Secretary" is now spreading torture apologist rhetoric by framing the character that worked for the CIA and approved torture as a successful but war-worn, down-to-earth realist that acknowledges that "life is more complicated than you think," while the character that vehemently opposed torture is framed as an overly-idealistic young adult that dropped out of college in protest and has to work menial jobs in retail to "learn how the world works."
Do you have proof Bush ordered it? I love theories, but I also love facts. I'm not sure I see equal outrage in te denial of due process to Americans killed by Obama's drone strikes. Let's be consistent in our outrage. Shouldn't Obama be brought up on murder charges since he ordered the execution of Americans, bypassing the Constitution, the courts and the law?
Absolutely. These guys are basically on one and the same party, constantly covering each other's asses and continuing each other's policies (except when it's politically expedient not to do so, or when there's a power struggle).
Bush wrote in his memoirs about how advanced interrogation wasn't really torture. Cheney says that both he and Bush knew.
There is a huge difference between torture and killing people with drone strikes abroad after they joined al Qaeda. Once captured, a person is no longer a solider or a combatant.
But some American citizen who is fighting for al Qaeda? He is a soldier.
The DOJ would say they do give him due process, but I think their definition is bullshit and can be dangerous.
But I don't think an enemy solider gets any due process. We didn't read the Confederate Army their rights at Gettysberg. We just shot at them. I just don't think someone at war and at large gets due process.
There is a little bit more nuance to it. Everybody knew but the time line is critical and congressional oversight didn't just approve torture, they found out after it happened and there was maneuvering to keep those who knew quiet. They told congress it would be illegal to reveal clandestine information and such, congress didn't exactly go to the mats to change anything though.
Overall, yes, everybody knew "enhanced interrogation" was in use and was effectively "okay" with it. Not that many knew what that was or what it included beyond sleep deprevation and water boarding. I think the way it was out sourced is absolutely interesting, there is a lot more than meets the eye there...
A lot of people involved sure aren't proud of it all though
Agree they should all be tried but in practice the best sequence may be to start at the bottom and establish there that crimes took place and have the defences establish the orders given as mitigation to build that case against the politicians and senior leadership.
Having the juniors in prision would build political pressure from those who follow orders (military etc.) for the politicians to join them and hopefully make it less of a party political issue.
It will never happen because the prosecution would logically include Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, and some legislators. I don't see a Republican administration prosecuting them because of loyalty, and I don't see a Democratic one doing that because I suspect Pelosi and Obama could be prosecuted as well (if new evidence comes to light). And without going after the very highest level offenders, you're throwing the CIA under the bus, and that won't end well.
Obama probably would not be part of the group but Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein would. Jay Rockefeller as well. These three very senior leaders in the Democratic party have sat on the Foreign Intelligence Committee during this period of torture and while supposedly not completely in-the-loop approved of what they did know of.
Obama is the president of the country blatantly, in the open, violating Geneva Conventions - Gitmo, drone strikes. Not that anybody, who matters, cares though.
The FAS (reputable german newspaper) on the front page: "Berlin wants to see torturers in court", according to the article politicians from all german parties think a criminal prosecution is necessary. Most likely there won't be any real consequences in the transatlantic relationship, if there isn't, as we are perfectly fine dealing with countries like Russia and China in a semi-friendly manner most of the time. The US has already lost a lost of prestige in the matter over the years, given that the black sites and "enhanced interrogation techniques" were more or less public knowledge. Ideally the whole Bush administration would be put on trial for war crimes and violations of the torture conventions, but that is a pipe dream of course.
Do you really think that? Even when something really bad happens? 9-11 type incident or worse.
Only following orders is no justification for war crimes including torture. The world needs to see that America believes that and that it doesn't just apply to Nazi's. America is an example to the world, please be a good one.
America hasn't been an example in their actual behavior to the world basically ever, that is just what propaganda and indoctrination wants you to believe. Not that most other nations did behave particularly well during their history either. The actual conclusion that has been more widespread during history than it is today, is that a world revolution by the oppressed and exploited would be necessary to disrupt the current power structure and bring about meaningful global political change.
I agree, but I doubt it would be in the interest of those making the decision whether to prosecute. So, I fear it will not happen, at least not for a few decades, maybe a century or two.
Yesterday, I heard this quote: "America is good. And if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great." (Reagan, 1983). Made me immediately think of gitmo.
Call me an optimist, but I doubt that. The lesser of two evils, yes, but good? No. Add in a bit of "if I do not let it happen, I'll be voted out and somebody else will order it" (it's a rare politician who dares to tell the public that, unfortunately, there's little that can be done to fix a problem) and "it's better that a good guy like me minimizes the amount of badness than that someone truly evil does it", and we get where we are now.
The downside with prosecuting the agents is that it would be an admission that the United States government can do wrong. The primary factor in the US government's decision matrix is "admit no wrongdoing ever, to anyone, under any circumstances, for any reason." Don't apologize, don't prosecute criminal wrongdoing by agents doing the state's business, and do not change. This has further implications: if the government has decided to do something, then it is by its very nature correct. And if the truth threatens to come out, such as in the CIA torture case, then the strategy is to fight disclosure every step of the way or, if that isn't possible, to minimize the damage through manipulating public discourse.
I believe this has something to do with sociology or some unspoken theory of governance that is understood by those with the most authority in government. I don't know if it is conscious or not, but intentional or no it's as if they believe that alpha males triumph, for governments to be successful they must be alpha, and the United States is the most alpha of the alphas. And if you're Alpha Alpha, you can not admit wrongdoing: that would indicate that maybe you shouldn't have been alpha in the first place and makes future decisions harder to convince people to accept. If that pattern continues on for long enough... Well, maybe you won't be a government anymore.
The Senate report was a great step. But the US will do nothing significant in response, because it is not in the nature of governments -- especially this one -- to attack themselves. Any changes will come as a result of external pressures, not from existing bureaucratic ones.
Actually there are enough governments that "attack themselves", it's called a multi-party system. For instance, in the Netherlands it happens quite often that the cabinet "falls" before the voting term is up. Make no mistake, the Dutch government are no saints either (sucking up to and practically being a US vassal state to name just one thing :) ).
The CIA coined the term "plausible deniability", if their superiors didn't know it's possibly because they didn't want to. I think this is less of a surprise than people let on, which is why I doubt the US will prosecute them.
Murder is illegal, and yet plenty of people risk imprisonment and even the death penalty for murder (often aggravated by torture).
Plenty more will risk their lives (and being imprisoned and tortured) to "defend their country" (or just for kicks, loot, "glory", etc) by going to war.
Those people are untouchable. They will remain untouchable until real revolution in US, or some sort of vigilantism movement. Any official charges against them would expose whole chain of command up to CIA/NSA directors to legal action, it will never happen.
> until real revolution in US, or some sort of vigilantism movement
America doesn't need a revolution, it just needs more informed and motivated voters who vote in their self-interest. Maybe that counts as a revolution, but the way you paired it with "vigiliantism movement" suggested some kind of violence or government overthrow which would be pretty awful to be honest and I hope never happens in my life time or the life time of my children.
>America doesn't need a revolution, it just needs more informed and motivated voters who vote in their self-interest.
No, one of two things is needed: either a revolution, or a mass migration of voters to places where their votes actually count. Both gerrymandering and the tendency of American seat allocation to favor rural districts have strongly reduced the effect of voting on the formation of actual governments.
"Seat allocation" doesn't favor rural districts, it favors many districts where you win 51% of the vote over few districts where you win 80%. You'd actually need gerrymandering to reverse this effect if, like today's Democratic party, your voters are concentrated in urban areas that would otherwise be perfectly natural districts to draw.
Yes it does, at least in the sense that "rural" means "low population density" or "low ratio of population to Congressional seats".
>[T]he Senate may be the least democratic legislative chamber in any developed nation.
>In the last few years, 41 senators representing as little as a third of the nation’s population have frequently blocked legislation, as the filibuster (or the threat of it) has become a routine part of Senate business.
>In this country, the ratio between Wyoming’s representation and California’s is 66 to 1.
This means that if you are a software or computer engineer living in California, as is the norm here on Hacker News, you have 1/66 the Senatorial voting power as anyone at all who happens to live in Wyoming.
>This pattern has policy consequences, notably ones concerning the environment. “Nations with malapportioned political systems have lower gasoline taxes (and lower pump prices) than nations with more equitable representation of urban constituencies,” two political scientists, J. Lawrence Broz and Daniel Maliniak, wrote in a recent study. Such countries also took longer to ratify the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, if they ratified it at all. These differences were, they wrote, a consequence of the fact that “rural voters in industrialized countries rely more heavily on fossil fuels than urban voters.”
Emphases mine. But please, explain to me why the voting majority should be consistently denied implementation of their ideas just to cater to people who happen to live where there aren't many other people? That's before we consider the influence of money on elections.
To not understand the Senate representational system is to not understand that the explicit purpose of the Senate was to prevent the tyranny of the majority. That was the foundation of the U.S. Constitution. The Great Compromise of 1787 was expressway to ensure smaller states had their rights protected. Without that compromise, tax dollars could be voted to improve New York City while draining the economy of less populous states. That's the genius of the American system. It is the very definition of a check and balance. The States are sovereign entities and deserve an equal voice. The House of Represenatives provides representation based on population, so that does ensure that every person is represented equally, while the Senate technically represents the states, which ensures that each state is represented equally. The foolish amendment that enabled the direct election of Senators somewhat diluted that dichotomy, but ultimately the Senate represents the states.
What's truly foolish is believing that not only is disproportionate representation somehow democratic but then arguing that it's preferable to leave the choice of that disproportionate representative up to those who already wield power.
Checks and balances. Wyoming has 1 representative in the house, California has 53. When you combine the house and the senate, it should (in theory) be much harder for a bill to pass without approval of both the majority of the states and the majority of the population.
Theory is nothing without evidence, and in lived experience, not only do bills completely fail to pass due to overuse of the Senate filibuster, but the House itself is now so thoroughly gerrymandered as to not even represent the majority of the population -- since most House elections are not, statistically speaking, contested at all.
The senate represents the states and the house represents the people. It would be entirely unfair if a small number of high population states could easily impose their will on a large number of small population states. States and their citizens gave up some of their sovereignty when they joined the union, and in return were promised some equitable form of representation, no matter the size of their population. Large states like Colorado bring massive amounts of land an natural resources to the union.
There's a reason we're a constitutional republic and not a pure democracy. Pure democracy would inevitably lead to a tyranny of the majority. Nine US states have over half the US population. Would it be fair for those few states to able to completely over-ride the interests of the other 41 states in the union?
>It would be entirely unfair if a small number of high population states could easily impose their will on a large number of small population states.
Why? "States" are arbitrary lines drawn in the soil. Should everyone who wants more power just secede and form their own state, ad absurdum?
Besides which, none of the actually existing countries with proportional-representation democracy have sent their rural regions to hell in a handbasket. You can't keep using a thought experiment as a reason to consider catastrophic outcomes from non-regionalist democracy plausible when the empirical evidence runs against it.
And, just to finish off, there's the issue that the current "states" don't even make sense as regional divisions. The citizens of rural upstate New York have far more in common with Vermonters, Western Massachussans, and even citizens of rural Pennsylvania and Illinois than they do with citizens of New York City. Yet because of the division into states, the interests of rural New Yorkers are neglected relative to those of Vermonters just because rural New Yorkers live on the same side of the completely arbitrary border as urban New Yorkers -- even tangential and immaterial association with cities is penalized under this system!
>Would it be fair for those few states to able to completely over-ride the interests of the other 41 states in the union?
This presumes that those nine states have completely unanimous elections. It is entirely fair that elections should be fought over the issues that matter to the largest portion of the people possible, that politicians should stand for election by putting forward the most appealing rational positions, rather than by catering to a disproportionately represented minority and deliberately neglecting the majority of citizens.
Despite the constant fear-mongering of antidemocratic political philosophers, majoritarian democracy, with the rule of law enforced, has never actually resulted in the predicted rounds of war, death, famine, and pestilence. To oppose democratic rule based on violent-mob rule being a bad thing is disingenuous.
State borders are not any more arbitrary than the border between Canada and the US. In the US, "States" are sovereign states that gave up some limited amount of sovereignty to join the Union. They are not simply administrative divisions like in other countries. The Constitution established a limited role for the federal government of the United States and reserved all other powers to the individual states.
It may seem like a historical relic now, but each state joined the union under the premise (and likely binding law/treaty) of retaining some sovereignty. Each state has it's own laws, courts, police, military, etc. It's a feature, not a bug, that rural states can prevent the cities from imposing a tyranny of the majority on them at a federal level via the senate. Just as the house of representatives based on population can prevent a bunch of rural states from imposing their will on the high population ones.
Take for instance Nevada. If the majority of the population of Nevada wants legal gambling, they should be able to have it. A pure federal democracy would allow 9 states to make a law banning gambling nation wide. That's far less likely to happen in the current system as low population states have reason to band together and prevent any federal over riding of the freedom of their state's citizens to self govern.
> In the US, "States" are sovereign states that gave up some limited amount of sovereignty to join the Union.
That's true of some of the states, such as the original 13 and Texas, but it's not true of most of them. Most states never had any form of sovereignty and were just arbitrarily created divisions of territory.
In terms of the Kyoto Protocol, are we still buying into the myth that global warming is caused by human carbon emissions? Have the last 17 years disproved that yet?
I've been screaming the "Let's migrate!" mantra for years. If we want rational politics in this country, we have to stack the polls with rational votes. As it stands, our voice is largely--in some instances, mostly--drowned out by single party voters. A pragmatic solution would be for the people who recognize the problem to migrate to the same city or county and work our way up the political ladder. I'm down; where are we moving to?
The trick is not to suppress a story, like you would with less sophisticated propaganda, but to frame it in a particular way. You can spin negative stories in a way that they either become tedious to the public quickly or by focussing on more or less irrelevant details and statements of officials about the story. There are probably a multitude of other tricks and techniques that are well known in the public relations industry and by now huge offices with many smart people whose sole job it is to direct a story in a particular way.
Viktor Bout is serving 25 year sentence in an American jail after being arrested in Thailand and extradicted to the US. The former CIA Milan station chief, who's been convicted in absentia by an Italian court, has been arrested in Panama and released next day instead of being extradited to Italy.
"no country wants the guantanamo people incarcered in Guantanamo, so we need to keep him incarcerted because we are really very afraid of them"
What?. No country wants the leftovers? They are not animals, are humans without rights.
USA, YOU create this shame, it is your duty to solve it.
So you want options? ok, here goes one option...
what if you'll release him and give them the USA citizenship and formal apopogies as retaliation?, A very small one for all they have suffered, seems to me.
Free this people, return them their dignitiy, a job and a life, and them disintegrate the guantanamo buildings to the roots, You can start the demolition just tomorrow if you wish.
> But they could be terrorists!
A lot of CIA agents ARE terrorists, and they are free. Nobody seems worried in USA by the idea of have one of this sadistic people in his neighborhood
This is not a shame to USA, is a shame and a pain for all the human race, and WE are the human race.
These are people who are charged with wanting to kill people and otherwise destroy the USA. There is no shame in locking people up who want to do that, though you can disagree with the charges all you want.
Wake-up. Where are his lawyers? where is the invisible jury?
If a real judge finds that some of they are guilty they should just be put in a real Jail. Just like any other american citizen. Can't see any real problem with this. Guantanamo IS still helping to destroy the USA, in fact, and should have been destroyed many years ago.
Why would a non-nation state actor need a lawyer? I could see returning the Taliban fighters to Afganistan since they were representing some sort of government. For people who have been picked up as part of Al Qaeda and its affiliate networks I don't really have a problem with holding them indefinitely.
I find the use of drones to kill Americans, and the casual acceptance of collateral damage to be far, far worse. Those Americans may have done terrible things but were still Americans with Constitutional rights, unlike someone we picked up in Yemen or Somalia.
As long as you use smart arguments, the opposite view is most than welcome. Everybody wants the same, that USA be able to clean and close this hideous and rotten page of his history.
But to declare that something "was charged with horrible crimes", when there was not even the slightest trace of a fair trial, is not an argument, is just to think that the rest of the world is plain stupid.
And to say that: "Some terrorists tell us that other guy was fantasizing with killing people so has been locked for the rest of his life and was his human-toy since them... and I don't see ANY problem with this", is just heartless cynism. What if they just lied to you?.
Currently in my country, with some thousands of evictions a day by the greedy of some "banksters" (formerly rescued by the people) a lot of people fantasize sometimes with a grand piano falling over the Minister of Finance in the most "ItchyScratchiest" way possible and that, after this, he rises and smiles with a denture of white keys, chirping birds around the head and all the stuff.
Boy, these millions of bad people should be locked and chieftly we _must_ assure that they never ever be able to join the jail band!... ;-)
You can't even get a cop to trial for shooting unarmed people to death in this country.
So good luck getting politicians to prosecute someone in the cia, especially when they got to destroy their own video tapes without penalty.
Just like the TSA, then the NSA and now the CIA, people get bored with all the alarms and warnings about extreme overreach and just go back to shopping and drinking. As long as they can do that, politicians have learned they can get away with anything.
I also noticed no-one gives a darn we are still using drones to kill large groups of unidentified people overseas.
I guess the "drone report" will be for the next president and congress to deal with in 8 years.
> Prosecutions by the U.S. itself, however, seem very unlikely. In 2012, the Department of Justice said that “the Department would not prosecute anyone who acted in good faith and within the scope of the legal guidance given by the Office of Legal Counsel regarding the interrogation of detainees.”
"We told you to break the law, so we won't hold you accountable for breaking the law".
OK. That'll hold up until somebody high ranking in the DOJ or State Department or $WHEREVER starts getting their feet held to the fire. IF that happens, I'm sure they'll sell out the underlings in the blink of an eye.
By analogy, it's like the head football coach who fires his offensive or defensive coordinator, in order to appease the owner and save his own job.
Supporting the UN human rights council ? Really ? Have you ever looked at who you're supporting just to get your way ? I mean, I'm all for holding those responsible to account, but, firstly, nothing will change unless the US itself holds those people to account. Second the UN are firmly on the side of human rights violators that make Hitler look like a beginner, and the UN itself also feels the need to commit massacres and mass-rapes on a regular basis. No one has even been held to account, not even in Northern Europe.
I mean, I understand the concept of realpolitik, but this is driving things very, very far.
Furthermore, there is no such thing as international jurisdiction, despite what the UN would want you to believe. It is about as legal as the US' execution of Bin Laden. If countries were to start persecuting each other's armies it would quickly end very badly, obviously. Hell, the half of the Saudi royal family would probably be sentenced to death in the US in the first month (because half of them have tortured and killed servants [8] [9] [10]). Do you think it'd be smart to do that ?. Also note that this is normal practice in Saudi Arabia [11].
Personally I find the UN's distasteful double standard an atrocious joke. Since 1994, the majority of UN member countries have constitutions in direct contradiction with human rights, the biggest one being China (well, in terms of power and population), and the biggest block being islamic nations, that disallow freedom of religion and equality of sexes (and usually equality of ethnicities as well, ie. direct legal racism, like it exists in the majority of islamic nations, as well as in China and other nations).
And that's ignoring the many, many, many human rights violations perpetrated by the UN itself [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]
As you can see on the Human Rights Council' wikipedia pages [6], the biggest human rights issues are :
1) Israel. Since 2006, EVERY meeting of the human rights council has over half of the time dedicated to Israel's human rights abuses. The person currently in charge of setting the agenda for this part of the meeting felt the need to publish this picture : http://www.theblaze.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/AS-Cartoo... (note the kippah on the dog)
"There has never been a single resolution about the decades-long repression of the civil and political rights of 1.3 billion people in China, or the more than a million female migrant workers in Saudi Arabia being kept as virtual slaves, or the virulent racism which has brought 600,000 people to the brink of starvation in Zimbabwe. Every year, UN bodies are required to produce at least 25 reports on alleged human rights violations by Israel, but not one on an Iranian criminal justice system which mandates punishments like crucifixion, stoning, and cross-amputation. This is not legitimate critique of states with equal or worse human rights records. It is demonization of the Jewish state." [7]
2) Defamation of religion (dozens of resolution calling for world-wide introduction of blasphemy laws)
And internal politics concerning who gets a seat (and over a million bucks per year, free travel, a staff, ...)
These are the guys you're asking for help. These guys should be taken out, dragged before a court, sentenced to death, and executed for their OWN crimes long before they pass judgement on anyone else.
[7] Bayefsky, Anne. "Perspectives on Anti-Semitism Today". Lecture at conference "Confronting Anti-Semitism: Education for Tolerance and Understanding", United Nations Department of Information, New York, June 21, 2004.
You are quite right in saying that the UN Human Rights committee is a farce. However, find me a nation-state with no double standards.
The behaviour of the US, as self-proclaimed champion of freedom and democracy, is especially egregious. It imposes an embargo on Cuba while shaking hands with the Saudis and thinks Israel can do no wrong. Not to mention its longstanding record of supporting human rights in some parts of the world while installing pet thugs in other parts of the world. In this light, a lecture on the UN's hypocrisy is laughable.
The UN isn't a nation-state. The US obviously acts to promote its own interests, as it should. It doesn't purport to be an objective and an unbiased protector of human rights across the globe. The UNHRC does, and that's the whole point of its existence.
I will go so far as to say that the US is better than the UN Human Rights Committee. Why ? I have walked around in the US, in Europe, in Israel (and the West Bank, not Gaza though), and Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and India.
The US, on the street and for it's residents, is 99.99% a free country that respects human rights (presumably at least in part because it's population constantly throws up stinks like this one). Walking around the US, well, I don't need to tell you what you see. I feel a lot safer on the streets of the US just talking to people and saying whatever my political opinion is than even compared to the Netherlands (it sometimes seems like 50% of the population there believes in a Jewish or US or "Capitalist" or sometimes communist conspiracy and they will shout at you, or worse if you try to reason with people about it). Saudi Arabia is a country of thugs where everybody in the streets is afraid of everybody else, and your sex and skin color, and to a lesser extent your dress, determine your worth (and if you're able to enter malls, bars and shops). Pakistan is 80% Saudi Arabia and 20% free. I'm not saying the US beats other countries in everything, far from it, but in freedom and "not getting your head bashed in/arrested/fired/... because you like political party X", it is by far the best country I've ever seen. The most aggressive response I've ever seen in the US to a political opinion is laughter. And I have never, ever, seen anyone in the US refuse someone access to a bar, shopping mall, store, or ... based on skin color, sex or religion. I have seen it often in Europe (bars only), and in the middle east it's considered normal to have ethnic, sex and religious restrictions on half the buildings in a city.
And frankly, the fact that the US Congress even looks at allegations of torture by a state agent, shows it's moral superiority over the UN. The fact that people can and do write about what the CIA did without losing their jobs, disappearing, getting shot or beat up, and worse, is a situation superior to what is found in the vast majority of UN member nations. Again, this, in my mind, proves the moral superiority of the US. Hell, even compared to Russia, which is definitely a first world country. Do you think Russia doesn't torture people ? When are you expecting the 2 first pages of the Moscow times to get dedicated to a 2 day session in the Duma about the Russian army's use of torture ?
Hell, according to amnesty international, Ukraine, Poland, Spain, Belgium and the Netherlands' governments have committed torture in 2014 [1](and some/most of them assisted the currently being discussed CIA program as well) [1]. I seem to be unable to find any discussion in their parliaments of that. They mostly seem to be talking about austerity measures, leaving/joining Europe, that sort of thing.
Here's a paragraph on Russia, from amnesty international :
"Torture methods documented by Amnesty International range from beatings, suspension from ceiling hooks, asphyxiation with
plastic bags, to electrocution, inserting needles under finger or toenails, dousing with freezing water and even rape."
About EU countries :
"The denial of police abuses is still the default reaction across the EU and the Balkans, where the institutional response and
thoroughness of investigations are frequently inadequate."
Again this is much better than their reports on the middle east and Asia (even the complaints about Russia and Turkey, at least in Russia and Turkey it seems to be easy to avoid state-sponsored brutality, which is not true at all in the middle east and a lot of Asia)
The UN has never even looked into allegations of it's own wrongdoing. And what half of UN member nations do comes dangerously close to "state-sponsored genocide" in many cases.
The US has moral imperfections. And yes, there's assholes that are employed by the US government in positions of power. This is no different from any other nation. They are bad, and must be dealt with, I fully agree there. The UN, however, is a collection of thugs, massacrers, racists and worse.
The argument you're making "the US and UN are both imperfect" is of course true, it is also completely useless. There is no hair on my head that doubts that the US has a massive moral advantage over the UN.
I feel that at the very least we owe it to Congress to let it figure out what to do. I'd be amazed if they didn't at least pass a law that this can never happen again.
I live in the Netherlands, so I'm just going to assume your generalisations about other countries are of similar accuracy.
BTW got a page nr. for that Amnesty report? Either it's not text-searchable or the text "Netherlands" doesn't even occur in that PDF (and yes I did look at the section about Europe).
I'm not saying the Dutch government is innocent, not at all. I do say, however, your generalisations are suspect. Especially for the part of the US respecting the human rights of their "residents on the streets" (I know that's not what you meant, but it was pretty disgusting to see the streets and subways of NYC "littered" with the mentally handicapped--hint: people don't start mumbling to themselves or screaming for no reason just because they're homeless).
Well, the thing is, western democracies are all for human rights for their own citizens (as long as we're not talking about a right for privacy). It doesn't prevent them from encouraging or committing abuses abroad (the recent torture thing, decolonization wars, the Phoenix program).
I agree. The UN isn't close to a great organization in reality, but at least on paper this is where the Human Rights are from and that's something most sane people can agree on.
In the end what really matters is to make sure people don't get tortured and that torture is frowned upon. I think this might be a step into the right direction. However, like with all such things I do not know if that's true. It could also mean there will be more secrecy and torture until death will become standard, to prevent these things from ever getting into any media. History will show us.
To me it seems impossible to predict the outcome, but I think you can't change things like these when they are not frowned upon.
This makes me think a bit of Operation Paperclip, where the US was also defending people who tortured other things. Of course you can't compare it like 1:1 (you never can). The thing though is that a huge society (Germany) changed a lot, because all the things that happened in the past are frowned upon. Yes, there are individuals who didn't learn from it, but they are a rather rare exception. What this means is that there are fewer people being harmed.
Sorry for pulling of Nazi-Comparison. It's just a great example for the change of thought in a society. It also happened to East Germany or a lot of Eastern European countries, that were indoctrinated by Stalinism and maybe even look at Ukraine. There it got so far that (on the mainland, in Kiev) they hate communism/Russia so much that the biggest party actually have SS runes.
That might seem far fetched now, but that's the point where I agree. One shouldn't just switch to the other side and blindly follow them, just because you share their hate. This is true for states, but also institutions or political systems.
Hopefully I didn't get too far with that connection.
CIA agents are vulnerable to prosecution everywhere for crimes like espionage and high treason. That's what the CIA is for. This doesn't seem to change much.
The Italians can go pound sand. They had no problem allowing the lead Achille Lauro hijacker safe passage to Egypt. And in 2008 they release another Achille hijacker -- a murderer and PLO terrorist. I don't really care if the Italians had their sensibilities offended by rendition. Rendition never resulted in an Italian citizen's death, but the Achille Lauro incident certainly resulted in an American's death.
I am not making a statement about if rendition is good or bad; I'm only addressing the Italian's hypocrisy.
It's good when people do good. Even if they've done bad in the past, good is still good. And Italy's prosecution of crimes committed on their own soil was both responsible and good.
One huge peave of mine reflects a general level of ignorance about CIA by both media and commentators; they aren't CIA 'Agents' they are CIA 'officers.' It might sound like a nitpick, but if the news media repeatedly gets such a fundamental detail wrong, how can they be even remotely viewed as credible in the bigger issues? It would be like a reporter referring to RAM as ROM; hard to to have any faith that they even have ever spoken to a CIA officer let alone have the basic knowledge necessary to write national and international media reports on the subject.
In case anyone is curious an 'agent' is a foreign national recruited by a CIA officer to spy. A CIA officer is the one that runs the agents. The FBI has special agents, but not officers.
The media uses the word "agent" to refer only to those who work in intelligence and defense agencies, so your explanation doesn't seem sufficient. And even if you are right - the word "agent" has a clear and different meaning in the context of intelligence, so at best this is a really bad choice of words.
It's an innaccurate choice of words and reflective of media ignorance on the subject. The media doesn't use the term "police agent" to describe cops nor do they call State Department consular officers "consular agents." The media, if they are interested in accuracy ought to start by getting the simple stuff correct. If someone is giving a talk at a conference about RAM and they keep saying ROM, perhaps you'd doubt their understanding of the subject. That's my point, the media loses credibility when they maintain use of innaccurate terminology yet they want to be perceived as an expert on the subject.
I believe that you are correct about the terminology - the way the CIA operates is detailed in books like Robert Baer's See No Evil.
However, I'm not sure that this kind of nitpicking actually matters - from what we now know people employed by the CIA tortured people and it doesn't really matter whether the correct term for these people within the CIA is "officers" or "agents" - everyone else is going to call them "torturers".
[NB I actually up-voted you because I didn't think you deserved to be down-voted. The agent/officer distinction is really important for how spies actually work (and the CIA is not alone in this) but it's distracting from the main point here].
> It might sound like a nitpick, but if the news media repeatedly gets such a fundamental detail wrong, how can they be even remotely viewed as credible in the bigger issues?
Well you probably have noticed that news articles tend to sound believable when they're about any subject matter except the one you have first-hand experience with. Hacker News is a good illustration of this phenomenon, since it seems that for every other article there's a person here who is, or knows someone who is involved in the situation described, and comments to correct many misconceptions in said article.
So no, it doesn't seem like a nitpick - it seems only rational to assume that most of the time news sites have no fucking clue what they're writing about. That, or they're deliberately lying to spin something.
Nuremburg was an exception to the general rule that you couldn't prosecute soldiers for carrying out the orders of their superiors - establishing that the mass genocide of innocent people crosses a line. However, the torture of a handful of active enemy participants might not.
It would not surprise me if certain countries interpret the meaning of "conspiracy" to include any US citizen, as one could argue that anyone who benefits - even passively - from a criminal act can be held liable.
I question the validity of this article. How would anyone know who the agents were? It's not like the CIA publishes a list. I doubt they used their real names.
There's the "of interest" clause. But more specifically, we talk a lot here about telecom and internet surveillance. It's good to raise up your head once in awhile and recognize that technical acts are not done for themselves, they're done for a larger goal.
All of these breaches we talk about here by the US and other governments are much more than offenses against technology, they resolve up the tree to support policy. To support kidnapping, torture and murder.
First, this would show support for international laws against torture and help put the lid back on Pandora's box. This would directly reduce the probability of captured U.S. citizens being tortured. No, that probably does not include those captured by ISIL, but are rogue terrorist organizations all U.S. citizens will need to worry about both now and in the future?
Second, it would close a dangerous precedent. Prosecuting those who committed illegal acts, even though they were assured of immunity, sends a clear message that individuals are still responsible for their actions. Without this sense of individual responsibility U.S. agencies will be capable of utterly anything and, the way things work, capability becomes reality more often than not. Most Americans would sleep better knowing that the NSA's workers are accountable to the law rather than immune to it if their superiors say so, as is currently the case due to the precedent set by the CIA.
Third, the implications for future diplomacy are a nightmare if the U.S. does nothing. There will be no moral high ground for the U.S. to stand on if the U.S. refuses to seek justice.
Finally, it's the right thing to do. The U.S. could set an example for others to follow. To do nothing does precisely the opposite.