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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Serious question, genuinely curious: when was the last time an officer in an American army refused an illegal order and it did not ruin their career permanently? That's easy, Oliver N...ohhh, you said "refused." No idea.
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Jan 6, 2017 22:37
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Mr. Nice! posted:Congress, would, for one. The supreme court would be the adjudicator, and the president would be required to follow their decision. This has happened before and will happen again. The president gets sued all the time. On the other hand, Andrew Jackson.
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Jan 6, 2017 22:44
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Mr. Nice! posted:Congress, would, for one. The supreme court would be the adjudicator, and the president would be required to follow their decision. This has happened before and will happen again. The president gets sued all the time. twodot fucked around with this message at 23:22 on Jan 6, 2017 |
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Jan 6, 2017 23:01
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Doc Hawkins posted:That's easy, Oliver N...ohhh, you said "refused." No idea. Yeah, I'm not sure it has ever happened.
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Jan 6, 2017 23:23
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twodot posted:Ignoring the fact you haven't explained why you think "Congress" as a body has standing (I seem to recall Congress members claiming they have some sort special interest in laws being followed recently getting slapped down, but I can't recall where). What decision would they make such that the President could even follow their decision? By the time this gets to the Supreme Court the prisoners have already been freed. Is the Supreme Court going to order the President to whip up some commandos and recapture them?  There's no point in even trying to have a discussion with you. You're either blatantly trolling, a colossal moron, or both.
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Jan 6, 2017 23:41
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twodot posted:Ignoring the fact you haven't explained why you think "Congress" as a body has standing (I seem to recall Congress members claiming they have some sort special interest in laws being followed recently getting slapped down, but I can't recall where). What decision would they make such that the President could even follow their decision? By the time this gets to the Supreme Court the prisoners have already been freed. Is the Supreme Court going to order the President to whip up some commandos and recapture them? "Congress" suing the president isn't really something that happened until very very recently. The question on whether or not they had standing was controversial but ultimately upheld, and the suit allowed to go through. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_of_Representatives_v._Burwell
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Jan 6, 2017 23:57
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esquilax posted:"Congress" suing the president isn't really something that happened until very very recently. The question on whether or not they had standing was controversial but ultimately upheld, and the suit allowed to go through. quote:Article I of the United States Constitution established the Congress, which comprises a House of Representatives and a Senate. U.S. Const. art. I, § 1. Only these two bodies, acting together, can pass laws—including the laws necessary to spend public money. In this respect, Article I is very clear: “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law . . . .”
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Jan 7, 2017 00:11
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Just recess appoint all the prisoners to the Supreme Court, they refuse to recuse themselves from the case and rule it a constitutional action.
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Jan 7, 2017 04:26
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EwokEntourage posted:They advised the president they wouldn't accept any nominees. He probably should have gone and talked to Garland and said "Sorry, ain't happening, they're assholes" and then recommended a new Justice every week at a press conference saying "So they aren't doing their jobs so I'm trying again, maybe this time they can actually show up to work instead of getting paid fat stacks of cash, privileges and the some of the best free healthcare, that we can't offer to you because of them, to do nothing.". ...that's a terrible sentence but I'm 3/4 asleep so gently caress it.
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Jan 7, 2017 11:28
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eNeMeE posted:They didn't, though. If they'd at least done that it would be far better - what they did was have a committee refuse to offer advice. Some of them said it individually but the Senate as a body never did. Maybe i'm missing something, isn't that kind of looking at things in too small of a scale to get a scope of what was going on though? The Senate Republican leader pretty clearly spoke for the party, and then backed up his actions by crushing any dissident opinions inside the party. And Obama did pretty much did say that they were horrible assholes and that they were basically not doing their jobs and stealing the money of the public. http://www.npr.org/2016/09/06/492857860/173-days-and-counting-gop-unlikely-to-end-blockade-on-garland-nomination-soon quote:To sum up events to date, hours after Justice Antonin Scalia's death last February, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell announced that there would be no hearings, no votes, no action whatsoever, on any Supreme Court nomination until the American people got to vote on a new president. That was part of the entire strategy about floating Garland, in fact. Since if he had put up an ultra-liberal the conservatives would have had an actual excuse they could point too as to why they didn't want him. In normal times Garland probably would have been about as partisan of a guy as you'd expect of a SCOTUS pick. The strategy actually did work at first, given that there were even Republican members of the house and senate saying that the vote needed to at least go forwards to where he could be formally denied for the position. quote:Since then, McConnell has firmly rejected that idea and brooked no serious opposition. For instance, when Charles Grassley, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, poked his nose out last week to suggest that Republicans might hold hearings on the Garland nomination during the lame-duck, the next day — his nose pretty obviously smashed in — he quickly backtracked. Archonex fucked around with this message at 14:08 on Jan 7, 2017 |
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Jan 7, 2017 12:45
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Archonex posted:Maybe i'm missing something, isn't that kind of looking at things in too small of a scale to get a scope of what was going on though? The Senate Republican leader pretty clearly spoke for the party, and then backed up his actions by crushing any dissident opinions inside the party. And Obama did pretty much did say that they were horrible assholes and that they were basically not doing their jobs and stealing the money of the public. Welp.
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Jan 7, 2017 18:10
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eNeMeE posted:...my memory is clearly still poo poo. I thought it was just some guys admitting that, not the head douchenozzle. They even had a passive aggressive little counter on a website that tracked Garland's wait for a hearing against every other justice nominee ever.
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Jan 7, 2017 18:14
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It'd be fun to see the Dems actually try to block Trump's nominee because in 24 hours we'd see more action and open condemnation of the Democrats by Republicans than we saw from the Democrats towards the Republicans during the entirety of Garland's nomination. And that's without including the poo poo Trump would be spewing constantly (or more than usual).
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Jan 7, 2017 18:16
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Mr. Nice! posted:They even had a passive aggressive little counter on a website that tracked Garland's wait for a hearing against every other justice nominee ever. The Republicans did that themselves? I thought it was just the Dems and every left-wing politics site.
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Jan 7, 2017 20:08
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haveblue posted:The Republicans did that themselves? I thought it was just the Dems and every left-wing politics site. No the white house did: https://www.whitehouse.gov/scotus
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Jan 7, 2017 20:11
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twodot posted:No it doesn't. It possibly betrays a lack of understanding of the legal understanding of the people running GTMO. I personally suspect their understanding is effectively "if the command says it's legal, it's legal" given what we've seen of the military's behavior since 2001. "Every single soldier from the gate guard to the Commandant who has rotated through Guantanamo Bay since 2002 is a ffffucking drone who never questions their government or values, unlike twodot who sees the truth." Tell me, O enlightened one, under what legal theory exactly are they supposed to be concluding that indefinite detention of enemy combatants is illegal? Seriously, I want to know what you're basing this argument that what we're doing is facially illegal on. Congress authorized it. The Supreme Court signed off on it. Tradition, law, and treaty allow it.(Oh, and nice attempt to shift the goalposts from detention to torture.) twodot posted:I mean General Petraeus exists, so I'm going to have to stop you here. Seriously, every time you go for one of these sick burns, you reveal the hilarious extent of your ignorance.
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Jan 7, 2017 21:26
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Mr. Nice! posted:No the white house did: What're the odds the GOP gets Trump's SCOTUS pick and wait to confirm them on March 16th for a maximum gently caress You to Obama and the Democrats?
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Jan 7, 2017 21:46
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Evil Fluffy posted:What're the odds the GOP gets Trump's SCOTUS pick and wait to confirm them on March 16th for a maximum gently caress You to Obama and the Democrats? I'll be amazed if his pick takes 30 days to be rubber stamped unless he puts up somebody unexpected.
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Jan 7, 2017 21:49
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Javid posted:I'll be amazed if his pick takes 30 days to be rubber stamped unless he puts up somebody unexpected. Im really wondering about who's rubber stamping here. Trump is way out of his element. I would expect his team to be able to select a candidate and present it to trump without much argument. What I wonder is how much space there is between the congressional leadership and the administration. I expect most real work in the next couple years to be all smoke filled room poo poo while trump is off clowning on twitter and distracting the hate machine.
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Jan 7, 2017 23:26
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Serious question, genuinely curious: when was the last time an officer in an American army refused an illegal order and it did not ruin their career permanently? The Slavers’ Rebellion
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Jan 8, 2017 01:21
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Hahaha, good point, but that's just treason. I'm looking for an instance where a junior officer was given an illegal or obviously insane order by a superior officer, refused said order, and had a successful subsequent career -- I'll settle for remaining employed at current rank.
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Jan 8, 2017 01:30
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Hahaha, good point, but that's just treason. I'm looking for an instance where a junior officer was given an illegal or obviously insane order by a superior officer, refused said order, and had a successful subsequent career -- I'll settle for remaining employed at current rank. Him not getting hosed with would mean command recognized he did the right thing. Which would make it unlikely to ever hit the news, both for the reason "man doesn't bite dog" doesn't and also because the military likes to handle stuff internally, and there'd be no one with an interest in making noise about it. Not saying it's common, just that I don't think there are likely to be a huge number of examples for posters here to pull from beyond personal anecdotes.
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Jan 8, 2017 03:41
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Hahaha, good point, but that's just treason. I'm looking for an instance where a junior officer was given an illegal or obviously insane order by a superior officer, refused said order, and had a successful subsequent career -- I'll settle for remaining employed at current rank. There is Hugh Thompson, a helicopter pilot who confronted William Calley during the My Lai Massacre, but even that's a stretch since he was outside Calley's chain of command and didn't actually disobey any direct orders IIRC.
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Jan 8, 2017 06:29
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Acebuckeye13 posted:There is Hugh Thompson, a helicopter pilot who confronted William Calley during the My Lai Massacre, but even that's a stretch since he was outside Calley's chain of command and didn't actually disobey any direct orders IIRC. And look how well he got treated :P Point being, the idea that soldiers will ever refuse a direct order -- even one that is blatantly illegal or coming from someone who is obviously insane -- is essentially a legal fiction. It doesn't happen. Hell, did anyone even refuse to torture the Guantanamo detainees? Dead Reckoning posted:You are welcome to disagree with the Supreme Court, but if you are, you need to offer some sort of legal reasoning more complex than, "well I feel like this ought to be illegal." You also need to stop conflating disagreements about what the law is with arguments about what the law ought to be. I'd remind you that your original statement was that it was really weird that soldiers would consider an order to detain a foreign national indefinitely to be legal, but not one to transport and release said foreign national against the explicit will of Congress and statute. This betrays a lack of understanding of the law as it exists right now. If you think the Geneva Conventions and Hamdi v. Rumsfeld are so facially wrong that professional bureaucrats should ignore them, that is going to require significant justification. Sure, but let's say you ran it up the chain and the order was verified as coming from the president, but was an order to do something explicitly illegal (for example, torture; the term "enhanced interrogation" was literally and specifically used by the Nazis at Nuremberg, so there is very clear precedent that "enhanced interrogation" is a war crime). Would you have done it? Are you aware of any instance where anyone has ever refused such an order and not faced career suicide? Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 06:49 on Jan 8, 2017 |
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Jan 8, 2017 06:46
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Point being, the idea that soldiers will ever refuse a direct order -- even one that is blatantly illegal or coming from someone who is obviously insane -- is essentially a legal fiction. It doesn't happen. Well you’re at least as hosed if you obey the order, so why not take the moral high ground?
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Jan 8, 2017 07:01
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Platystemon posted:Well you’re at least as hosed if you obey the order, so why not take the moral high ground? You'd think, but honestly you probably aren't as hosed obeying an illegal order. If you disobey you KNOW your career is over. If you obey, there's a decent chance you'll get away with it and your superiors will cover for you -- see everyone who committed torture under Bush. The CIA destroyed evidence in violation of a federal court order to protect those guys. I realize this is a bit of a derail but it's a question I've been thinking about a great deal lately given the incoming President.
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Jan 8, 2017 07:03
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:If you obey, there's a decent chance you'll get away with it and your superiors will cover for you -- see everyone who committed torture under Bush. The CIA destroyed evidence in violation of a federal court order to protect those guys. Only if in covering for themselves they incidentally cover for you. Sometimes throwing subordinates to the wolves is the most expedient course of action.
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Jan 8, 2017 07:08
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:You'd think, but honestly you probably aren't as hosed obeying an illegal order. If you disobey you KNOW your career is over. If you obey, there's a decent chance you'll get away with it and your superiors will cover for you -- see everyone who committed torture under Bush. The CIA destroyed evidence in violation of a federal court order to protect those guys. Are you thinking the CIA may contravene an order from Trump?
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Jan 8, 2017 07:09
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Bueno Papi posted:Are you thinking the CIA may contravene an order from Trump? It's not so much that I'm thinking they will do it as that it seems very likely a situation will arise in Trump's presidency where someone in the military should refuse an order.
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Jan 8, 2017 07:15
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Sure, but let's say you ran it up the chain and the order was verified as coming from the president, but was an order to do something explicitly illegal (for example, torture; the term "enhanced interrogation" was literally and specifically used by the Nazis at Nuremberg, so there is very clear precedent that "enhanced interrogation" is a war crime). Would you have done it? Are you aware of any instance where anyone has ever refused such an order and not faced career suicide? Your original question was Hieronymous Alloy posted:when was the last time an officer in an American army refused an illegal order and it did not ruin their career permanently? On the military side of things, I'd guess illegal orders happen with some regularity, but tend to get quashed before they are actually executed. The institutional memory of My Lai is so deeply burned into the officer culture (Hugh Thompson was awarded the Soldier's Medal and invited to speak at the military academies in his later years) that spicy "LET'S DO THE WHOLE loving VILLAGE!" situations are basically unheard of. The examples I recall were situations where commanders overstepped their lawful authority, either in the course of a command directed investigation, to try to mete out some unusual form of discipline, or to try to avoid mission failure by circumventing the rules. Usually these quietly go away as soon as the JAG office, Inspector General, or a superior gets wind of them and explains that they can't actually do whatever they are trying at. It's hard to say whether anyone's career was ruined for raising concerns with the JAG Corps, because most commanders already play favorites, and can easily tank someone simply by withholding their favor, rather than going out of their way to gently caress them. There are a lot of grey areas as well. I know there have been cases during the recent wars where pilots refused to commit to airstrikes that they thought were not permitted by their rules of engagement, and their superiors simply found someone who would. The thing is, RoE are mostly self-imposed standing orders, not statutory laws, and concepts like "acceptable risk" and "self defense" are not always as clear cut as we would like. It's quite possible for both sides to have had reasonable interpretations. You didn't ask about grey areas though. I'll preface this by saying that the concept of a blatantly unlawful order coming all the way down from the National Command Authority, through all the intermediate layers of command, to a company grade officer is such a radical hypothetical that a lot is going to turn on the details of the situation. But assuming I got a memo straight from the top saying, "DR, I need you hook this detainee up to a car battery - Barry O." no, I wouldn't do it. Lord knows I clashed with my superiors, to my detriment, over far less consequential matters of operations and policy. I wouldn't particularly care if my career suffered either. If it got to the point where I was being given facially illegal orders with the acquiescence of my superiors, my command would no longer be the mostly good (if somewhat hidebound and frequently stupid) organization I had dedicated my service to, and my career would soon be over one way or another. You're really asking the wrong question though. In the military, far more damage is done by commanders who prioritize results and foster a climate where they look the other way or never question how those results are obtained, than is caused by those rare few who explicitly order their subordinates to commit unlawful acts.
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Jan 8, 2017 08:49
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quote:All the enhanced interrogation stuff was done by the CIA
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Jan 8, 2017 09:00
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EwokEntourage posted:A bunch of army personnel was involved in the abu gharib poo poo. See also my earlier comment about commanders who don't actually order anything illegal but choose to not ask questions.
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Jan 8, 2017 09:37
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EwokEntourage posted:A bunch of army personnel was involved in the abu gharib poo poo. I remember some news show went back to shithole county bumfuck to find the one PFC or whatever that got photographed with a pile of naked detainees and she's basically the whitest trash ever, worse than Tonya Harding.
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Jan 8, 2017 11:03
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FAUXTON posted:I remember some news show went back to shithole county bumfuck to find the one PFC or whatever that got photographed with a pile of naked detainees and she's basically the whitest trash ever, worse than Tonya Harding. Lynndie England? Born November 8. It was a sign.
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Jan 8, 2017 11:48
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Platystemon posted:Lynndie England? That's the one! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tal2ihKSdr8
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Jan 8, 2017 12:07
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I remember that time I hated a lieutenant who worked for me and told the sergeant first class on patrol with him to kill him and blame the Taliban, confident he'd never disobey an illegal order. The rest of the deployment was much less aggravating after that, I can tell you. The culture of following all illegal orders really made things easier on us officers now that every private has a JD and reads all of the government travel regulations for fun and just instantly identifies every order that might violate a rule.
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Jan 8, 2017 14:14
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This entire line of discussion was a non-starter. Grunts as a line of defense in ethical disasters as complex, notorious, and apparently legitimized as the Gitmo torture program? Have you been for real this entire time? If you do fully honestly think something different would have happened if you Mr Constitutional and International Law Buff were there, I mean, fanfiction is a thing, but Jesus this issue has been a tripwire for everyone involved excepting for those who set it up and prepared shaky legitimacy for it at high levels in the first place. This and stuff like it was/is well beyond the initiative of the boots. Maybe some can blow whistles and get hosed in the process, but refusing illegal orders isn't a factor in avoiding this poo poo.
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Jan 8, 2017 15:21
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Dead Reckoning posted:Yeah, but that wasn't sanctioned by the White House or their command, which is why Lynndie England ended up doing a year and change in the brig and has a felony record now. Pro tip to aspiring war criminals: your odds of going to jail go down the more senior government officials you can have documented as having knowledge of and consent to your actions. I don't generally tend to engage in conspiracies, but I don't buy for a minute that there wasn't at least implied approval of this from superior officers. Your statement about having documentation seems to imply that in your post as well. I find it easy to believe that someone told the ppl involved to "enhance interrogation" the prisoners and then, at a minimum, turned a blind eye I'm not really interested in discussing this subject and prolly wont follow up ( as fair notice). As I don't think we are disagreeing that much but not gonna put the effort in to delineate it
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Jan 8, 2017 17:19
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PREDICTIONS The best pick from Trump's SCOTUS list is Gorsuch. He will not be put up for consideration. I'm betting they'll put up Sykes (female with conservative views is great optics as a sword and shield, not just in confirmation process but also in conservative decisions that come down for the next 20 years) though obviously Pryor is the other front runner. Whoever is named will get confirmed.
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Jan 8, 2017 17:20
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Potato Salad posted:This entire line of discussion was a non-starter.
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Jan 8, 2017 21:46
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