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This is just the Month of Zero Accountability, isn't it? America: where an authority figure's right to swing his fist doesn't end anywhere at all
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Dec 9, 2014 20:37
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Volkerball posted:Funny to say about a government report outlining all this in plain view of the world. Yeah, but what the government report details is that nobody has been in any way punished for any of this, and likely won't be. Not to make a cheap reference, but there ain't exactly an indictment coming out of this any time soon.
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Dec 9, 2014 20:52
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Stultus Maximus posted:And as a properly ratified treaty, the UN Convention Against Torture requires Barack Obama and Eric Holder to prosecute those responsible - they have declared that torture did take place. Seriouspost: we're going to be having a new attorney general appointment process soon. "Will you prosecute the war crimes in revealed in the Senate's torture report?" will be a nice question to ask her. Odds that someone actually does? 20 for / 80 against, I'd say.
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Dec 10, 2014 04:22
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Orange Devil posted:Morally there is none and why should we give a gently caress about what the law says it is? In international law there is explicitly no statute of limitations on torture, and it's a crime of general jurisdiction, so other countries can prosecute torturers they catch. If nothing else, none of the torture enablers will be able to travel internationally for the rest of their lives.
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Dec 10, 2014 14:03
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District Selectman posted:So clearly this is all pretty terrible, but I'll say one thing. Even though it's only a very small percentage of our functioning government who put together this report, you have to at least have a tinge of hope that there are people in the government who put in the work to get this out. You know that there couldn't have been many people actively helping them, and poo poo, it's gotta be hard to work on something like this when about 99% of everyone you work with/for doesn't want you to do it. Well, I'd take more hope if it weren't that the only reason this all came out is, as best I can tell, because the CIA was dumb enough to get into a pissing match with the Senate Intelligence Committee.
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Dec 10, 2014 14:35
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Unhinged Vulcan posted:The full report is 6,700 pages. The general public has only been given a fraction of the full report. This is piecemeal damage control. Future generations will probably just shrug their shoulders. "Yeah, america was hosed up back then...Vice President Dick Cheney used to hang out at the COBALT site and masturbate furiously." 200 years from now, the space-blogs of the space-future will be filled with people posting at each other about how President [it's actually hard to think of a less likely Presidential Name than Barack Hussein Obama] may be bad, but at least she isn't a torturer!
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Dec 10, 2014 14:56
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SedanChair posted:Compelling, but I want to see his smooth, fat head drop into a basket. Your thoughts? The national psychodrama of the past few months has been America's abandonment of the rule of law. It's important that legal accountability be restored. Nuremberg is the only legitimate response. Since we won't, I hope he travels outside of the country and some other nation does what has to be done.
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Dec 10, 2014 15:04
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Davethulhu posted:Next time you're out with him, could you stab him in the eye? Tia No, no, no. That would be wrong, and we shouldn't encourage death threats or vigilantism. No matter how tempting. Just convince him to go with you on a European Vacation.
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Dec 10, 2014 20:39
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Mightypeon posted:They would have to be hilariously dumb to try that. Unfortunately one thing the torture report proves is that the CIA is in fact hilariously stupid. Whether they'd try something like that I doubt, sure, but their lack of stupidity isn't a good argument.
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Dec 10, 2014 21:01
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duz posted:According to the report, literally ever piece of useful intelligence, since nothing that came from torture was usable. Even the information leading to bin Ladin's courier came before the CIA got to torture the person that provided it. Yeah, according to the CIA's own internal documentation, Jack Bauer ticking-clock situations are entirely mythical; in every single case the actionable, useful intelligence came from traditional, torture-free interrogation. There were several reasons for this; among them, the main ones seem to be 1) that trained interrogators are actually pretty good at getting information out of people voluntarily just by pretending to be their friend, and 2) people being tortured say whatever they think you want to hear, so what they say tends to be inherently unreliable for that reason; they'll scream anything that pops into their head if it'll get you to stop the pain. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 21:32 on Dec 10, 2014 |
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Dec 10, 2014 21:29
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duz posted:Naw, it's running under the logic that to accept a pardon, you have to admit you committed a crime. The flaw in this logic is that 1) none of those involved are willing to admit they committed a crime, and 2) a pardon eliminates the public shaming aspect of this, which is essentially the only negative consequence any of the perpetrators have faced.
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Dec 10, 2014 21:52
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AreWeDrunkYet posted:Best argument for these people is that something like 1 in 5 of the people tortured were innocent. Takes balls to torture an innocent man!
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Dec 11, 2014 00:17
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Xandu posted:I hate to sound like a neocon here, but what was the Senate's rationale for not actually interviewing anybody? Seems like an odd decision unless nobody at the CIA or in the White House/DoJ was willing to talk. From what I've been reading on Andrew Sullivan (say what you will about Sully, he's been consistently against torture) this is the rationale: quote:One of the ironies in this, of course, is that Hayden has been criticizing the Senate Report’s failure to interview the CIA torturers themselves, even though the Durham investigation legally precluded that for three years. But the Senate Report had an obvious alternative to such interviews: it had the CIA’s own internal documents, its very internal conversations, in which it is perfectly clear that as they were practicing torture, they knew what they were doing could not be described by anyone as “humane”. These documents alone are more than sufficient proof of the claims made in the report. They are definitive. More to the point, no documents were included from any other source – either to buttress or to contradict the findings. But in the Durham “investigation”, the torturers were interviewed but not the victims – a clearly rigged process designed to exculpate the war criminals.
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Dec 11, 2014 00:21
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Kazak_Hstan posted:
The only rational explanation I can think of is a burnout, frustration, and meta-trolling ("Mr. Bush, if you think you didn't do anything wrong, why won't you accept a pardon?"). Or maybe the act of pardoning would make other nation's prosecutions easier somehow?
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Dec 11, 2014 01:13
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NoEyedSquareGuy posted:In an effort to clear up some of the confusion surrounding the information in the report, CNN has brought on expert legal analyst John Yoo to offer his insight. You're joking right?
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Dec 11, 2014 01:36
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Mr Ice Cream Glove posted:This was all over the internet this morning Joke's on them: torture doesn't gather information.
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Dec 11, 2014 14:40
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ActusRhesus posted:it's not so much whether *he* supports tu quoque. It's how it would go over in court. If a jury (or whoever the fact finder is) sees the people pushing the prosecution as just as barbaric as the one in the defendant's chair, and questions whether this is just an exercise in scapegoating, it's a recipe for jury nullification. I wonder where, exactly, future historians will say "here, this point, is where Americans abandoned the rule of law."
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Dec 11, 2014 22:08
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Boris Galerkin posted:Why torture when they can just straight up kill people? "Hands up! Because they are tied into a stress position!"
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Dec 12, 2014 13:25
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TACD posted:Is it safe to say at this point that the US has the most well-funded and expansive torture program that has ever existed? Yes, but mostly because of solitary confinement in us prisons.
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Dec 12, 2014 16:14
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Chamale posted:When did the transition happen for so many people to start thinking like that? I vaguely remember a time when torture was something bad people did. Obviously that attitude changed somewhere between 9/11 and the end of the Bush Administration, but when the first reports of torture came out were people outraged about them? I guess it was split between the people who said "support the President no matter what" and the other 50% of the country. Fox news was part of it and Team Republican Is My Team Right Or Wrong is part of it and let's sock it to the browns is the rest.
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Dec 13, 2014 19:55
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Dr. Faustus posted:A lot of, "They knew all about it then, there was never any need for this investigation." That's the thing; all the opposition to the torture report is based on lies of one kind or another. On the one hand, yes, the Democrats did know some of this -- and they deserve to be shamed for that! -- but they didn't know all of it and they didn't know how utterly pointless and useless it all was, because the CIA was lying to everyone about those things.
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Dec 14, 2014 01:07
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I just thought the report stately clearly that the CIA lied, like, a lot.
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| # ¿ May 13, 2024 23:21 |
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mcmagic posted:The man is an utter sociopath. I'm looking forward to all the major candidates getting asked similar questions.
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Dec 15, 2014 17:40
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