Then when we get there and someone disappears (say, a colleague, a friend of a friend), some will think and even say "they must have done something". How do I know? Because that is what happened in Argentina during its Dirty War. Oh, I know, most of you will say "that could never happen in my country because we're a first-world Western nation", but Argentina very much was and still is a Western country, complete with rule of law ("Estado del Derecho"), and it was much wealthier then relative to the rest of the world, and had been truly first world in 1950. So, yes, these things very much can happen here in the U.S., and in Canada, and in the UK, and in France and Germany and Spain and Italy and Netherlands and Belgium and Norway and Sweden and so on.
It takes a very small number of men to do most of the torturing and killing domestically. Sure, lots more are needed to do the arresting (disappearing) of victims. But not very many need to get down and dirty. Just ten men killing 150 victims/year would have covered the majority of the killings in the Dirty War over six years.
Isn't that the exact opposite of disappearing?
I think the examples you're looking for are DHS hotel/detention centers [1] and Chicago's hidden detention centers [2].
[1]: https://abcnews.go.com/Business/marriott-choice-hotels-serve... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homan_Square_facility
Asking for a civilian to be tried for treason by a military tribunal for saying... the same things that a government official has said, but in a way that makes the government look bad, is the same thing as abandoning the rule of law.
We've only ever done such things during the Civil War, and even then Lincoln only suspended Habeas Corpus in limited places as needed. And Lincoln violated the Constitution in that case, as suspension of Habeas Corpus is, by its location in Article I of the U.S. Constitution, clearly only something Congress can do (though Article I, section 9(2), does not actually say so), and Chief Justice Taney correctly concluded as much in Ex Parte Merryman. (That said, I think Lincoln by and large did the right thing.)
Yes, we've had wartime restrictions on speech that sucked and were not constitutional and should not have been used at all, both in WWI and WWII. But we didn't treat such speech as Treason, nor did we have military tribunals for those speakers, nor did we suspend Habeas Corpus at any time other than during the Civil War. And those were declared wars. Trial of civilians by military tribunals is really only something you'd expect in a civil war, and only when the constitutional order has fallen apart.
But that's not disappearing. Assuming the tribunal found him guilty and gave him X punishment everybody would know (Obviously assuming the tribunal found him not guilty then he wouldn't be punished anyways).
Disappearing would be when your neighbor that always lets his goats chew all of your grass tells the cia that you're a terrorist so they come (and nobody else knows where you went) and get in the middle of the night so you won't keep chasing his goats away.
I didn't say it was. I said it's getting us closer to that world.
> Disappearing would be when ...
Disappearing is when a civilian gets taken (doesn't matter the time of the day, whether anyone notices or not), and the person in question does not get an arraignment in any open court nor any followup open court proceedings (e.g., trial), and where family gets no access to the person, with no way to determine their whereabouts and health or even if they remain living, typically for a prolonged period of time.
(Sometimes the family of a disappeared has connections and can get them released quickly, but most often the family does not, the authorities lie or refuse to say anything about the case, and the person languishes for years before being released unless they die or are killed during the time that they are held in this way.)
In other words: disappearing == unconstitutional denial of Habeas Corpus, often paired with torture and/or murder. A breakdown of the rule of law and constitutional order.
The English invented Habeas Corpus (to my knowledge anyways), and I suspect that they must have had some experience with disappearances during one of their 17th century civil wars.
When Habeas Corpus is suspended pursuant to the Constitution, and a civilian is arrested, and the family is allowed to see them during the time that the person is held, then that is not a disappearance, though the constitutionality of the suspension of Habeas Corpus may be suspect. When constitutional order is restored, the expectation would be that the person would be released or arraigned. Considering that in the U.S. Congress has never suspended Habeas Corpus, and that Lincoln did suspend it, but only in limited areas and during limited times during the Civil War, we should consider that the circumstances that legitimately call for suspending Habeas Corpus must be extreme. Certainly the current situation in Ukraine does not remotely call for the suspension of Habeas Corpus in the U.S., nor for anything like military tribunal trials for public persons who make their opinions heard. It is my fear that calls for the latter are a bad omen presaging the denial of Habeas Corpus.
Military tribunals are used for military personnel because that is part of the deal, and our military services are professional (not conscripted). Yes, the UCMJ would apply to conscripts, should we return to conscription, but conscripts would still not be civilians, and most civilians would not be conscripts.
I live in the US now but I come from a third world country (Iran) where such atrocities are commonplace. And let me tell you. What is happening to Assange shows that when it matters, the intelligence community is above the law and not that different from those bizarre authoritarian regimes. It's just that their propaganda machine is just more successful at "spinning the stories" and making people believe Ed Snowden and Julian Assange are anything but heroes.
What gives me hope is:
a) McCarthyism (surely that was worse, yet we made it through)
b) this language is happening on privately funded cable news that approx 5% (I believe) of Americans watch on a daily basis. That's a far better place than coming from government officials.
These things not only „can happen“, they happened in the not too distant past - much less than a generation ago:
1. There is strong evidence that the CIA ran - and maybe still runs - black sites across Europe used to kidnap people and bring them to Afghanistan or Guantanamo for torture. 2. At least half of Germany used to be a socialist dictatorship until 1990. People disappeared on a regular basis - and those responsible for kidnapping, torturing and killing dissidents still live among us, as our neighbors, as businessmen or members of parliament.
> ASPA authorizes the President of the United States to use "all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release of any U.S. or allied personnel being detained or imprisoned by, on behalf of, or at the request of the International Criminal Court". This authorization has led the act to be nicknamed the "Hague Invasion Act".
> The act prohibits federal, state and local governments and agencies (including courts and law enforcement agencies) from assisting the International Criminal Court (ICC). For example, it prohibits the extradition of any person from the U.S. to the ICC; it also prohibits the transfer of classified national security information and law enforcement information to the ICC.
> The act also prohibits U.S. military aid to countries that are party to the ICC. However, exceptions are allowed for aid to NATO members, major non-NATO allies, Taiwan, and countries that have entered into "Article 98 agreements", agreeing not to hand over U.S. nationals to the ICC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Pr...
https://www.hrw.org/news/2002/08/03/us-hague-invasion-act-be...
edit after 7 upvotes, sorry: I just want to make clear that I still largely support Pax Americana, because the alternatives are worse. But this law is cowardly and actually works against US interests, just like torture.
I'm convinced they know what the ICC is as it's even spelled out above, they just ignore the uncomfortable arguments.
> make climate change the issue
The ICC is the International Criminal Court [0], which is "Trying individuals for genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and aggression". The US is not a part of it after formerly withdrawing about 20 years ago. It shares this position with other countries with strong human rights values like China, Sudan, Indonesia, or Israel.
Moreover the US has passed the infamous "American Service-Members' Protection Act" [1] (also known as the "Hague Invasion Act") which authorizes the President of the US to use "all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release of any U.S. or allied personnel being detained or imprisoned by, on behalf of, or at the request of the International Criminal Court" and also prohibits the United States from providing military aid to countries which had ratified the treaty establishing the court. This has exceptions if the countries in question already have bilateral agreements with the US to the same effect. The US went as far as to criminalize anyone who works for the ICC [2]. None of this can possibly be in the interest of justice but only to protect the ones who violate human rights as long as they advance US interests.
Since the US does not itself punish or even acknowledge any war crimes commuted by them you can see how this is not a matter of "we can't have others punish our people" it's just "we can't have anyone punish our people". There's only one reason for the situation to look like this and that's quite literally to be able to commit war crimes with impunity.
If you were looking at things that put countries like Russia, China, Israel, and others at the exact same level, it's the ease with which they commit such atrocious crimes and go unpunished. But with "due process". That should tell you everything you need to know about their actual values, not the ones claimed on a forum by people who selectively ignore whatever doesn't fit their world view.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Pr...
[2] https://theconversation.com/us-punishes-international-crimin...
Additionally, sovereign states are already free to prosecute anyone within their borders.
The ICC, however, would preempt US judicial authority — including the US Supreme Court.
I don’t see a due process violation in your link — just an example of how abdicating sovereign judicial authority can go wrong, as is the case with diplomatic immunity.
Which basically says "the state must respect the legal rights owed to a person" according to the legal process. And those can range from "you have none because we think you're a terrorist" to "whatever you desire because you're rich enough to buy yourself laws, or at the very least judges".
I will quote something I said just 2 days ago:
> Speaking of due process, 97% of criminal cases don't actually go to trial in the US and are instead settled with plea deals [0]. The sentencing is so harsh for anyone demanding trial and losing that it's mostly a paper right at this time. It does give people the warm fuzzy feeling of justice and correctness though.
Under these conditions having "due process" matters a lot less than you think. China also has laws against having more than 3 children, it just happens that Uyghurs are disproportionately imprisoned for breaking them. Can you think of another group of people being disproportionately imprisoned elsewhere?
> We still have extradition treaties
What's the value of treaties if attempts to enforce them are met with threats from a country with powerful economy and military? The US has repeatedly threatened countries to deter them from ever attempting to prosecute US citizens even for things as serious as war crimes (including the famed "Hague Invasion Act [0]) despite never actually taking any actions to punish this even internally. Like a mob "protection tax", it's not a real agreement if it can't realistically be enforced both ways.
What sort of moral high ground do you think you're defending now? I find it both fascinating and depressing that people find pride in defending such behavior just because it's enacted by their country.
[0] https://innocenceproject.org/guilty-pleas-on-the-rise-crimin...
[1] https://www.hrw.org/news/2002/08/03/us-hague-invasion-act-be...
Not without being invaded by the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members'_Prot...
The ICC only has authority in territories where a sovereign state grants them authority. Hence the act, a threat to invade a sovereign state if that sovereign state follows the legal process they've legally decided (by signing the Rome statute) and prosecute an American citizen
> and only prosecutes cases that the sovereign states are themselves unwilling to prosecute.
Cases that the sovereign state defers to the ICC as their established legal process.
The alternative of supernational courts dispensing justice at an international level is essentially loose federations of gangs doing the same thing.
And, when a kid in a crips neighborhood tries to join the bloods...
Doesn't seem to stop other countries from doing this internationally and to their own citizens anyway. Something like the ICC in how you're envisioning things can only work when it's backed by military force. So long story short, it is mainly just the U.S. enforcing things, which doesn't really change anything.
What other countries are constantly drone assassinating people in other countries territories?
The closest to that I can think of might be Turkey and Saudi Arabia with their drone operations in Syria and Yemen, but those campaigns accompany full blown open military campaigns, quite a bit different to US signature strike operations.
So you can only be murdered in your sleep by a drone? Nothing else counts?
But yea sure whatever. Here's 5 seconds of Google search [1].
> but those campaigns accompany full blown open military campaigns, quite a bit different to US signature strike operations.
I think that's a bizarre distinction to draw. Why would a military operation justify anything? U.S. drone strikes previously did accompany full-blown military campaign anyway.
[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2021/09/16/france-...
That's neither a French citizen nor is it anything beyond an anecdote. If you can show me France's equivalent to Pakistan [0], then we might be getting somewhere.
> I think that's a bizarre distinction to draw. Why would a military operation justify anything?
It's not bizarre at all; Weapons of war being used in a conflict of war is something very different than dropping weapons of war on a civilian population you are not officially at war with.
Well I don't know why it would matter that it's a French citizen. And I'm not sure how in the world you're claiming this is an anecdote as if France's drone strike were untrue. Do you have a direct source that contradicts the account of the French government?
> If you can show me France's equivalent to Pakistan [0], then we might be getting somewhere.
Why would I need to show you that? You asked for an example, not "show me an exact equivalent to this thing I haven't previously mentioned".
> It's not bizarre at all; Weapons of war being used in a conflict of war is something very different than dropping weapons of war on a civilian population you are not officially at war with.
Ok then we're at war with Pakistan (since that's the example you're using). Great now we're back to where we started and you got the "war" designation you wanted.
Because the US is even droning its own citizens [0], you were the one who originally brought this up as something the US allegedly does not do.
> And I'm not sure how in the world you're claiming this is an anecdote as if France's drone strike were untrue.
In that particular case it's not even clear it was a French drone that got him, the French only reported his passing, but going after him was a joint operation together with the US.
It's an anecdote because France has only been using drone strikes since 2019 and only in Mali, that's about two decades after the US first started droning people and about a dozen fewer countries droned.
> Why would I need to show you that? You asked for an example, not "show me an exact equivalent to this thing I haven't previously mentioned".
I asked for an example of a country constantly droning some place or another, which the US very much does, as the US has the most active and largest scale (global scale) drone program on the planet.
> Ok then we're at war with Pakistan (since that's the example you're using). Great now we're back to where we started and you got the "war" designation you wanted.
The US is not at war with Pakistan and I'm not "wanting" any designations.
You where the one who claimed "doesn't stop other countries" like the US drone program ain't some massive outlier, like the US didn't champion and normalize this for two decades.
And it only became normalized as nobody dared to seriously call the US out on it, even those who are directly enabling such US atrocities [1]
[0] https://theintercept.com/2017/01/30/obama-killed-a-16-year-o...
[1] https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/12/08/germany-could-have-deli...
America is an international gang not an international cop.
I just think that America is uniquely incapable of that.
An EU led super power emerging after an American collapse might successfully step into that role. Probably not, but still possible.
One person's policeman is another's mafia don. The international system as it exists, exists how you're describing it (supranational entity backed by national militaries) - it's just that the absence of the premier and effective military (America) makes that infeasible. So railing against America, calling the country a gang and mafia don, and advocating for it to withdraw from international organizations that it basically maintains flies in the face of your stated ideas and goals.
> An EU led super power emerging after an American collapse might successfully step into that role.
I mean that's certainly a scenario of events that could happen, but recent events on the ground suggest the EU is far too weak and neutered to supplant the United States in a meaningful way. It's more likely that the EU would break down and give way to war and conflict than create a unified state - hence the reason for NATO and the EU being created to babysit Europeans who continue to start war after war. More likely is just that the collapse of America (whatever that means) would give rise to either new nation state actors, or China, or some yet unknown and interesting new nation state.
One of the things that I think is interesting that has come out of the recent conflict in Ukraine that was started by Russia is that it is breaking the illusion of rules-based order on the international level and people are apparently very surprised about this.
Unfortunately might does make right at this level of interaction. To the extent that "fair" international organizations can exist they only can exist in that they are enforced by might and power. Actual bombs, guns, tanks, money, resources, and taking the lives of others. All of these organizations: the UN, ICC, WTO, you name it only exist in a meaningful way because they're literally backed by the United States' willingness to bomb or take away someone's toys (Russian yachts), and that you'd advocate for distancing the US from these organizations is to lead to the collapse of them without clear, ready replacements. No country or group of countries has the apparent ability to do this. Even the EU cannot conjure up a single, unified military and impose its will on the world.
Much of this anti-Americanism is geared toward sowing division where there is none and trying to convince Americans to be isolationist so that these international organizations do break down and then other countries can murder and pillage with impunity. I think it's safe to say we can reject this, in favor of a rules-based international order that is imperfect, but can be backed by America and supported by the EU and other participants such as Japan, Australia, Singapore, and others.
For the most part I just view this stuff (being anti-America, destroy international organizations, etc.) as right-wing talking points supported by bad actors to break ties in democracies.
Wait, what? I'm American... South American, to be precise. The US as world police doesn't exactly fill me with confidence, given their track record in our part of the Americas.
Whether this world policing is a "US liberal" or a "US right-wing" thing is of no interest to me. Both camps will call anyone who disagrees anti-American, anyway. (I think right now it's more of a "US liberal" thing but it used to be "US center-right/neocon". US politics are confusing!).
Just to be precise, being American means you're from the United States of America. I don't call myself North American, for example. Neither does anyone else. When you introduce yourself you don't say "Hi I'm the_af and I'm from America". That would be confusing, unless you're actually from the United States.
> The US as world police doesn't exactly fill me with confidence, given their track record in our part of the Americas.
Compared to what?
> Whether this world policing is a "US liberal" or a "US right-wing" thing is of no interest to me. Both camps will call anyone who disagrees anti-American, anyway. (I think right now it's more of a "US liberal" thing but it used to be "US center-right/neocon". US politics are confusing!).
The "let's get America out of international organizations" rhetoric are right-wing talking points propped up by countries that seek to divide democracies. Brexit is another good example. It's not that you're being called "anti-American" it's just that you're incorrect. The rhetorical talking points that discredit our international institutions and create anti-American sentiment seek to destroy those institutions (because they're maintained by the United States) to get the US to withdraw from those organizations to collapse them.
No, this is false. I call myself American. We're from the Americas. (North)American exceptionalism is bullshit.
But my point is that disagreement over US policy and their role as world police, and disagreement with their Manifest Destiny, is not "being anti-American". Even the phrase "anti-American" reeks so much of exceptionalism it should be avoided at all costs.
I'm not anti-American. Being American is about cooperating with all of America, not being a bully who doesn't have to comply with the rules unless you're the one writing them.
Ok. I don't really think I have anything else to add from this point on. Have a good day/evening.
But the point is that using these words, "American" and "anti-American", to refer to how people across the world choose to bow down -- or refuse to -- to the way things are handled by the US, is absurd. If you don't look up to the US you're not anti-American.
Nobody is "anti-American" just because they don't think the US is (or even should be) the guiding light of freedom and morality in the world. Nobody is anti- or un- American because they think the US is not above the rules.
"You're either with us or against us" -- a ridiculous and jingoistic mindset.
American = Citizen of the USA
I mean, you do you, but don’t get mad when people don’t understand what you’re trying to say.
But this is neither here nor there. I didn't intend to lead this in a linguistics direction, but rather towards this notion of Manifest Destiny and exceptionalism, that leads some people (like the ones who replied to me) to believe that rejecting the notion of the US as World Police is somehow the same as being "anti-American".
Since not everyone is from the US, I argue, this idea that we are "all in the same boat" and pushing against US supremacy and above-the-rules'ness is somehow "being anti-American" and "right-wing" is both ridiculous and parochial.
> don't complain when people don't know what you're talking about
I'm not complaining and everyone here does know what I'm talking about.
Actually it was u/ericmay who was complaining about alleged "anti-American" sentiment. Because this is about the world stage and about international rules, the interpretation that America != US is particularly relevant in this case; the interpretation about "common usage" is less relevant since this has major implications for the rest of the world (i.e. that the US is not above the rules and is not the moral light of the free world or whatever).
The bubble of people who post on HN have been living in that cloister for the last decade or so, not realizing what goes on in the world. At the end of the day, the US has made it a policy to defend and promote democracy across the world, and has actively done so, through it's support of international institutions and protection of democratic norms.
Possibly more than any other country in the world.
Although one can say that the US stopped being the good guys when they nuked Japan.
They're a shill, it's fine.
Can't you see that Ukraine war is the direct consequence of this decision? To reinforce the statement: all public polls in 90s showed Russians to be very enthusiastic about cooperating with West, they truly believed that the Western model is just and brings prosperity. But it is US' political arrogance and notorious "exceptionality" distracted not only authorities, but people from believing US. People lost trust in US even before propaganda started to arise. Think about it, my American friend.
Of course, living in such a safe island as USA, far from potential enemies and with insanely huge military budget you might think it is not your problem. And obviously you do. But keep in mind that every consequence has a cause.
In 90s US had a unique chance to make this world a better and safer place, but instead US planted seeds of nowadays' wars. Have you heard of Wolfowitz Doctrine (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfowitz_Doctrine)? Even written in diplomatic language, it is horrific. Current US foreign policy is no better.
So please don't BS us that US "defends and promotes democracy across the world", because it simply doesn't. You accuse people on HN of "living in cloister", but it is you who transmits US slogans without slightest hint of critical thinking. Dixi
Poor grammar
Blames Ukrainian self determination for the war.
This is a shill propaganda account
Maybe some, but some of us in Latin America live in countries that at times have been subjected to US "influence" which resulted in subverting governments, abductions and torture. All in the name of freedom and fighting communism, which I guess makes it alright!
The subject of this article, that the United States government tortured was not so lucky.
Do the constitutional rights of a USA citizen need torture to maintain?
After 9/11, was anyone calling for diminishing US government powers? Maybe a few people, but for the most part - just the opposite - we wanted to hand even more power and money to the federal government.
[0] https://theintercept.com/2017/01/30/obama-killed-a-16-year-o...
Back then I’d ask my classmates to look at the other UN member countries not signatories to the Rome Statute subject to the ICC: China, Iraq, Israel, Libya, Qatar, and Yemen. Not exactly a list of countries championing human rights or state Sovereignty, the US included.
Absolute sovereignty is a very romantic notion, but the US gives up sovereignty regularly through other treaties, it is very telling the Rome Statute is where the US and others draw the line. If you are worried about violation of your US Constitutional Rights you should be significantly more concerned about the US government that in the last 20 years has created secret kills lists and conducted extra judicial killings of its own citizens including bombing citizens abroad in violation of the territorial integrity of other nations. When those charged with protecting and enforcing your Constitutional Rights are the ones violating them, I personally like the idea those bearing the most responsibility be subject to an International Court.
I don’t want to say your concern about being subject to the ICC as a civilian otherwise in contravention to your US Constitutional Rights isn’t worthy of discussion or potential concern, but it is detached from reality. Moreover, the ICC has jurisdiction over things like genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity it’s not exactly a “criminal court” the average citizen is likely to find themselves in violation of their Constitutional Rivhts (though perhaps you are not a civilian rather a high ranking military officer, in which case I understand your concern over an international court that prosecutes war crimes and human rights abuses).
That's far from a complete list. There are 193 UN members[1]; only 123 have made themselves subject to the ICC[2].
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Member_states_of_the_United_Na...
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/States_parties_to_the_Rome_Sta...
The US has also signed but not yet ratified the treaty. We're not one of the 41 who haven't signed.
> Of those 41 members feel free to highlight those countries which are shining examples of rule of law and human rights.
I couldn't name any countries I would consider "shining examples of rule of law and human rights", ICC member or not. Even the ICC itself has been accused of racism and neo-colonialism because nearly all its prosecutions have targeted Africa.
I did notice that Ukraine, like us, signed but didn't ratify the treaty, which I thought was interesting at this time.
It’s a little more nuanced, Ukraine formally declared acceptance of the jurisdiction of the ICC following Russia’s initial illegal use of force and armed conflict in Ukraine beginning in 2014.
Thereafter Russia withdrew their signature from the Rome Statute in 2016 the day following the ICC report on Crimea classifying Russia’s act as occupation.
Since then, it has been on track to ratify the statute, recently affirming ICC jurisdiction to prosecute war crimes going as far back as the Euromaiden protests.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/03/02/ukraine-countries-reques...
I could just as easily turn that argument around and say “why would the US want to sign onto an agreement that include countries like Jordan and Cambodia that have no rule of law”?
The ICC is no different than the UN - an international body that is a convenient cover for powerful nations to cloak themselves in.
Charges against African despots? Well Europe is on board for that!
Charges for war crimes during the Afghan war? Whoa there! We never agreed to that!
Pointing in the direction of a hypothetical doesn't really change that.
> Charges against African despots? Well Europe is on board for that!
And Europeans as seen from the trials of the war crimes that occurred following the breakup of Yugoslavia.
> Charges for war crimes during the Afghan war? Whoa there! We never agreed to that!
And yet the ICC has been investigating war crimes during the Afghan war, until the US started sanctioning ICC employees. They have since restarted the investigations. https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/prosecutor-se...
Of course they don’t.
My point stands - if the ICC starts charging powerful members states citizens you’ll pretty quickly watch support crumble. That’s why the African countries are pulling out - it’s pretty clear how the court will be used and it won’t be pointed towards its most powerful members.
Rather than join that circus, the US would rather bow out.
Not really, I just don’t think you understand of the Rome Statue and ICC jurisdiction works.
An aggressor State is subject to the ICC whether or not they are a signatory to the Rome Statute so long as the violations occur within a signatory State that has accepted jurisdiction of the ICC.
Russia was able to withdraw from the Rome Statue, but that’s only meaningful because they are a permanent member of the UN Security Council with veto power, that only applies to 5 countries, and none of them are African. Meaning African countries can be subject to ICC whether or not they are a signatory provided they are the aggressor and the crimes are committed within a country that is a signatory.
The US isn’t bowing out of something it thinks is a circus, the US was part of the negotiation process to create the ICC, the US is a major advocate of the ICC and other International Tribunals, the US just doesn’t want to be subject to their jurisdiction.
I'd appreciate if you at least finished one argument before shifting to another.
- OP was dishonest by listing only a few countries that haven't signed on
- OP argument was "everyone else is doing it", which is not very convincing
- My argument is the ICC is no different than the UN or other international bodies, their authority comes from the most powerful members, so you can guarantee the most powerful members won't play nice when they're in the crosshairs (as evidenced by the current countries' citizens being prosecuted are all minor powers)
I don’t think you know the definition of dishonest. One final time I list a number of countries that aren’t signatories to the Rome Statute, I never stated or implied that was an exhaustive list.
>OP argument was "everyone else is doing it", which is not very convincing
That is dishonest because that was not my argument and obviously inconsistent with the fact that I gave a list of countries that “were not doing it”.
Lastly your argument fails in light of every other international body the US is a part of, every treaty the US is a part of, and every international law the US is subject to…the irony is that is my argument. Moreover, your argument is “the ICC is no different than the UN or other international bodies” and the US isn’t part of the ICC. because “powerful countries won’t play nice”. If you don’t see where your logic breaks down, try to answer why the US is a member to all the other international bodies you claim are “no different” than the ICC, and the US is part of those other bodies but not the ICC.
One final time I list a number of countries that aren’t signatories to the Rome Statute, I never stated or implied that was an exhaustive list.
Let's see exactly what you said "Not exactly a list of countries championing human rights or state Sovereignty, the US included." Your argument (that the US is aligning with states that don't champion human rights) falls apart if other countries exist beyond that list that don't fit that singular conclusion. In fact, many countries that don't respect human right did ratify, so that completely blows up your argument. But you knew that, so that's why you only listed the countries you did.
That is dishonest because that was not my argument and obviously inconsistent with the fact that I gave a list of countries that “were not doing it”.
You said "When all other countries we'd consider the closest things to paragons of democracy we have signed it, it paints a pretty clear picture." How else does one interpret that other than "the US should do it because the other good countries are doing it"? It's a terrible argument - my parents would say "if your friends jumped off a bridge would you?".
If you don’t see where your logic breaks down, try to answer why the US is a member to all the other international bodies you claim are “no different” than the ICC, and the US is part of those other bodies but not the ICC.
It's because the US (like the major EU powers) make a choice - get a seat at the table or don't. Joining provides no guarantees that they'll adhere to the rules of membership. If the UN were to pass a resolution saying "Russia rightfully owns Poland and the land within the prior borders of East Germany". You think Germany will go "gee golly, we're a member of the UN so we better just hand it over". No, they'd weasel their way out of their obligations and defend their sovereignty. Just like the US and every other nation would.
That’s at least the second time you direct quote me on something I didn’t say. That’s the definition of dishonest or you don’t know how quotes work.
If you had better reading comprehension you would clearly see my post isn’t about what the US should do or shouldn’t do, much less about “they should jump off the bridge because everyone else is jumping off a bridge.” My post was about “why” the US isn’t a a signatory to the Rome Statue. The list of other countries not signatories to the Rome Statute, for the most part, have a history of foreign aggression and human rights abuses, the US included, so of course they don’t want to subject themselves to the ICC because it is against their interests to submit themselves to a tribunal that has jurisdiction over their actual and/or anticipated crimes.
> It's because the US (like the major EU powers) make a choice - get a seat at the table or don't. Joining provides no guarantees that they'll adhere to the rules of membership. If the UN were to pass a resolution saying "Russia rightfully owns Poland and the land within the prior borders of East Germany". You think Germany will go "gee golly, we're a member of the UN so we better just hand it over". No, they'd weasel their way out of their obligations and defend their sovereignty. Just like the US and every other nation would.
And yet the US is a member of the UN and not the ICC. Your response does nothing to explain the question I asked you to defend your position, why the US would be part of the UN and not the ICC.
Good luck in your future endeavors.
And you clearly didn't read my last paragraph where I clearly stated why the US would be a part of the UN and not the ICC.
I think the main thing you got from law school was how to weasel out of prior statements.
But I think the real issue is that the CIA doesn't want oversight from anyone foreign or domestic.
However, whether or not US judges are, or may be, appointed to the ICC or any other tribunal, US judges don’t make them domestic courts nor would they apply domestic law.
From the time of the Nuremberg Trials these kinds of courts are commonly called international tribunals in English, the ICC is just a proper name of one such international tribunal. Another includes the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, which was not a domestic court.
Arguably the first hybrid international tribunal/domestic court was the Special Court for Sierra Leon where both international law and domestic laws were applied. If Liberia ever successfully gets a war crimes it is likely to be a similar hybrid international tribunal/domestic court approach. Coincidentally I was part of a law clinic that represented a number of Liberian refugees and torture victims and obtained a $22M judgment against the son of the Liberian ex-President Charles Taylor in the US under the Foreign Tort Claims Act. If you’ve ever seen the movie Lord of War, the son is the character in this clip [2] with the golden AK-47 though the names were changed to Baptiste it’s otherwise pretty accurate, down to the fact Charles “Chucky” Taylor Jr. was a private school kid in Florida with a normal life until he went to Liberia and become the head of his Father’s security force ironically called Anti-terrorism Unit.
Which is nowadays commonly handwaved away as the "Embarrassing Trump episode of the US", like it was unprecedented and will never happen again.
But it wasn't Trump who put the responsible ASPA in place, that happened under Bush, and Obama never brought that up as something he disagreed with.
Which is the same dynamic with most of these laws that give more power to the US executive; Both parties keep expanding and enjoying them, it's not seen as a problem because each of them gets their turn to then make use of them.
[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-54003527
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-usa-icc-idUSKCN1QW1ZH
People now counter any claim like this with "that's whataboutism!". It's free reign to be be hypocritical I guess.
The fact that Blackwater exists doesn't make Wagner any less evil. Whataboutism is using one to shut down conversations about the other.
Besides a few anecdotes, how many torture debriefings have you read and then cross checked?
Unless you’re in the industry, how could you possibly think you have an informed opinion on methods of intelligence gathering?
While the myth about Tprture's (lack of) effectiveness persists?
The idea that being an "industry" insider is necessary to understand Human Psychology 101 is also misinformation.
These ideas come from the NSA, CIA, etc. It doesn't mean they're true. It doesn't mean we have to buy them.
The most famous is Mitchell Jessen and Associates, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Elmer_Mitchell#Work_as_a... , but it's not the only one. Margot Williams published articles about an airline company used to send people to black sites across the world.
In rouge states it is.
Just saying....
EDIT: On the subject of dictatorships and the UN, there's a brief but insightful essay I recently came across recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30687498
> So many member states are themselves dictatorships that engage in horrible human rights violations—and they stick together. The latter point is key: the worst countries are far more united in protecting human rights abuses than the democracies are in protecting human rights.
Why so? Perhaps for Iraq you've forgot about the fact that VP Cheney's former company made significant gains from that lie?
The idea that one side's lies and unjustified violence are better than the other side's is why the wars and hypocrisy continue.
Either we - the ones being served cake - call all BS or we don't. But ongoing mediocre excuses for mediocrity aren't working.
/rant
First of all, I'm advocating for American behavior to remain beyond reproach and I favor prosecuting the American officials who misled the American public in the case of the Iraq war.
That said, I heartily reject the binary categorization between unblemished and blemished countries because all countries fall into the latter group. Of course there are differences in the quantity and degree of lying and unjustified violence that your scheme glosses over--the idea that no country is better than say, Nazi Germany or Stalin's Russia or Maoist China serves only gives rhetorical cover to the worst offenders/offenses: "who is Canada to criticize Nazi Germany considering its track record of unjustified violence against its own native population?". This is the worst kind of race-to-the bottom rhetoric.
"Oh. Our lies and murders aren't as bad as {insert culture panic button here}" continue to work well for the elites, not so much so for the rest of us.
How about we put a cultural / sociopolitical price on say the USA's three-quarters of a trillion DoD budget? Certainly there's plenty of injustice that could be addressed with that type of $. But instead we buy into the status quo narrative?
That's not working. The point is, let's get our own house in order, instead of manufacturing a narrative that is bold-faced, shameless, hyprocricy.
I don't understand what you are saying here. More than one group can commit war crimes.
So it is not true that it undermines “our” moral posture. That is just rethorical gymnastic.
I think the US militaries have insufficient controls to uncover and punish war crimes, and the “American Servicemembers Protection Act of 2002” is particularly disgracefull. I believe the US should do better.
That being said when Russian troops intentionally shell civilians that is a war crime.
This case of excusing Russia's invasion of Ukraine because the US commits war crimes is gold medal mental gymnastics and really only makes sense in the context of the history of Russian propaganda.
I double-checked the parent comments and not a single person did that.
One can be a hypocrite and also be correct. Either a nation is committing war crimes, or they aren't. Either it's morally justified to oppose war crimes, or it isn't. You can't argue that the US should be punished for war crimes without also arguing that the US and NATO are correct to oppose Russian war crimes.
Otherwise, the argument is that Russia should be allowed to commit war crimes because the US gets to, which is at best an extremely childish way of viewing the world, wholly separated from morality.
I mean the poster at the top of this thread immediately tries to make some justification…
> This is the kind of stuff that probably makes some people’s job down the pipe easier and at the same time undermines the Western civilization.
No! It’s just wrong! We should never do this to other human beings. Period. But you want a GOOD reason why not ?
Because the people you trained to torture abroad one day return home and get jobs like security outside the nightclub your teenage kids are going to. You’re literally training psychopaths which later get unleashed on the public at home.
Also we know torture doesn’t work for information gathering. It’s only useful as a tool of oppression. Which is why we’re actually using it.
But seriously. I can’t believe I need to make the case against torture. It’s just wrong.
Ultimately they created a show that fed into the publics desire for revenge, post 9/11, and made a big success out of it.
What it leads to is the point I already made - the goal torture is oppression; to create fear and thereby obedience, not gathering information.
"The new law authorizes the use of military force to liberate any American or citizen of a U.S.-allied country being held by the court, which is located in The Hague. This provision, dubbed the "Hague invasion clause," has caused a strong reaction from U.S. allies around the world, particularly in the Netherlands. "
"U.S.: 'Hague Invasion Act' Becomes Law"
https://www.hrw.org/news/2002/08/03/us-hague-invasion-act-be...
I agree that the cost of moral high ground is a great loss to the society as a whole. We may never be able to recover from this. Guantanamo Bay is part of normal conversation and barely raises an eyebrow. Without going into details, my boss's kid recently said his dad drone strikes people ( he does nothing of the sort ).
This is the new normal.
Every government ever had and will have this problem.
What we should try to achieve in our society is to limit the power given to individuals on other people and allow each member of society to be free of centralised coercion. Nobody should have a monopoly on violence and nobody should be able to forcefully collect taxes from people and then go and wage a war on foreign people.
You can call it being anti-establishment, I call it being morally consistent with the idea of freedom which is so often touted in the USA.
How does having "the moral high ground" help the lower class of a society?
[0]Specifically here our non-upper crust humans.
That attitude with the associated American power was a complete catastrophe for:
* Iraq.
* Nicaragua
* Panama
* Cuba
* Afghanistan
My greater point here is that global politics is an inherently amoral game. By extension a morality-based strategy is inherently sub-optimal.
[0]addendum: To be clear there are definitely arguments to be made that some or all of them weren't good for Americans (e.g. loss of global goodwill may have resulted in less favorable trade agreements).
War is a crime.
The war crimes I listed were a catastrophe for everybody connected.
FWIW: War is defined by Clausewitz as the continuation of politics by other means, not of diplomacy. (It's probably the most famous theory of warfare, by the preeminent theorist.)
Clausewitz wasn't normalizing war, but explaining it: it's politics using violent means. If you don't understand the fundemental political nature of warfare then you will make major mistakes and many more will die and suffer. Those mistakes still happen: You can see that the US in Afghanistan lacked a clear vision and strategy for a political outcome. In those countries you see the results of defeating an enemy militarily and not politically. Russia, even if they 'win' militarily, will have a very big political problem in Ukraine.
That is to say, war is not other means. It is the primal means of diplomacy from which all others spring forth.
I'm not sure I understand what you're arguing here. Let me spell out my alternative interpretations and tell me which (if any) is what you meant:
a- War is the primary principle or tool of diplomacy. It is by the threat of war that diplomacy without violence can work.
b- Like a-, but with the implication this is the right way, and there's no other non-violent means for humans to resolve their disagreements and organize themselves at the world level. It will always be "my way, or a club to the head".
c- Like a-, but with the implication this is a historical artifact and reflects a sad state of affairs, and that true diplomacy will find a way to work without resorting to the threat of violence. Or at least, that this is a goal worth striving for, even if humans are imperfect.
The distinction matters, because a- and b- make it easy to jump to the conclusion "in this case" violence is warranted ("I hate war, but this is a just war!") and that "boot to neck" diplomacy is sometimes needed and unavoidable. Whereas option c- will always consider resorting to violence a kind of failure and not something to celebrate or chest-thump about.
Clausewitz, the leading scholar of war in modern history, called it 'the continuation of politics by other means', so it's not so easily discredited.
> the idea that murder is a crime at the personal scale is underpinned by the threat of murder
It may be partly underpinned by that threat, but my choice not to murder is not because of some threat, but because I very strongly don't want to murder people. That is the case for almost all humans, except the sociopaths. I don't follow HN's guidelines because I'm afraid of being banned, but because I want to treat people well and have a high-functioning community. People want to live peacefully, safely, see others prosper, etc.; conflict happens because we feel threatened.
The idea that people are fundamentally sociopaths seems like a popular assumption, and like many logical extremes, I think that is because of its logical clarity. It's a simple, easy theory to work from. But that's not how humans are.
In the international arena, most relationships are not underpinned by threat of violence. For example, the relationships between most European countries are not that way - that's one reason Russia's attack is so shocking. France and Germany are not fundamentally deterred from fighting because of the threat of violence - why the heck would they shoot each other? They want to trade, see each other prosper and live freely, and make money. Though certainly, lacking an effective international government, it is more anarchic and violent than life in democracies.
Diplomacy is not crime.
Try living in a small country!
I remember, I took part in a modeling competition trying to create a sustainability index for countries. During my analysis phase I realized that almost everything measurably bad you can think of correlated astoundingly well with the corruption index for that country. Even what seemed like very distant externalities.
It is echoes of the respect one human has for another.
That high ground also sets the standard for society. Some people will mock 'moral' leaders, but that leader sets the example for all. If that leader lowered their morals, the maximum, the example of what was possible, would also be lowered for all, to everyone's detriment.
Or, morality matters, we demand and mostly get the rule of law, and then we all benefit from not getting disappeared, tortured, killed.
It's very simple. Everyone needs the State to act morally. The "lower classes" need it even more than the "higher" classes! The poorer you are, the less protection you'll have from an immoral State.
Only in Marxist/Leninist fantasies do "the lower classes" benefit from not having a moral State: because the State will crush the "higher classes" for the benefit of the lower, yeah!!1! That's what always happens!! Not. That's very much not what happened in the USSR.
No, when the State foregoes morality, everyone suffers.
Because real moral does not just affect the rich? Also called being social.
You can expect further disruption, collapse of institutions, political or military coups etc and none of these are great for the low class people. As the establishment crumbles, a time for a new order will come and the left wing, the right wing, the QAnon and others will start fighting over the fix. Some will say eat the rich, others will say guns for everyone whoever wins takes it all and many will be concerned on what would lizard overlords do.
You're mistaking a prevailing attitude today for some "antiestablishment movement". You're right that a lack of moral compass is causing our society to degrade. But "the establishment" and "the barbarians" is essentially the same group - anyone with power or a platform today has learned to package themselves as against some "system" whenever it's convenient and things being bad, it's often convenient (plenty of "rogue CIA officers doing what "the system" won't do to defend America" types out there - they have had publicity with shows like "24" as well). Of course, the prevalence of and even admiration for, unprincipled chameleons is a way this society is degrading as well. But it's situation anyone would have trouble walking back.
There never was any moral high ground, the establishment were successful at making people FEEL as such. We are quick to point fingers at Nazis, Terrorists, Enemies yet the Western perspective is always 'we can do know wrong, if we did, its justified' which is exactly what the opposing side does.
Once a subtle reminder that many supported Nazi ideals early in America, even as Jews were being sent to gas chambers, companies like IBM were happy to do business with the regime, very much like they do with CCP companies as well as Putin.
There really is no way to change this without outside intervention, I will leave that to your imagination.
I understand what you're trying to say with respect to dirty hands, and not wilfully misunderstanding you.
But, wrong. There _was_ a moral high ground. It subsisted within the group of people you claim were duped. Those were and always will be the people who count, who hold the _normative_ values of a society. What they "feel" is American Values (more broadly "western ones").
The "establishment" you mention were the bad guys, and remain so. To the extent they spit on normative values then claims refuge in the necessity of dirty hands, they are unsoldierly and they play into the hands of the enemy who seeks to divide us and undermine our values. They may was well be KGB/FSB agents in our midst.
My point was try to see it from the people on the receiving end of pax Americana and tell me why the opposing sides reacted the way they have.
History is written by the victor and you simply don't get to hear from the losers. Therefore, there can be no absolute comparisons. You push somebody to poverty or vilify them, there is no exit but the desired outcome you seek. Once again, narratives is what shapes our reality, and the one that continuously virtue signals is the one that ultimately wins.
May I humbly give you links to some reading which I hope will benefit your views and arguments in the future. It pertains to a specific phrase I used above.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dirty-hands/
https://www.emerald.com/insight/publication/doi/10.1108/s152...
respects
This makes absolutely no sense unless you insert some unfounded premise of national/Western exceptionalism somewhere.
We can only try to make the State consist of institutions that keep it mostly moral. Doing so, and mostly succeeding, gives us the moral high ground even when there are some failures.
But when those institutions fail to keep the State mostly moral, watch out, because then we're in trouble.
And yet it is worth noting that the US government released this information under their own policies to the detriment of the "political class" and their own credibility worldwide. This is an important aspect of Democracies. I doubt you'd see the PRC releasing documents about the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region which will for sure be received as bad any time soon.
(This is not said to justify the acts in the article to be clear, but to point out a property of Democracies which is important)
I don’t know if I agree with that. I think folks underestimate how much conflict in interests “regular people” in different countries really have.
See, this specific situation has happened because a worker decided that their job will be accomplished easier this way. For the mass surveillance or denial of privacy for people is based exactly on the same idea: If they have access to people's communications they will spend less time and money to do their job in comparison to more involved traditional methods. I find it ridiculous that people are expected to be harmed or denied privacy in order to improve the efficiency in an institution.
Whether this torture business is right or wrong is not even part of the discussion, and might not even be relevant -- the whole point is that the angelic Western Civilization might be beset by the devilish "anti-establishment movement".
The point being about optics. Not about the suffering caused by torture.
> What's the point of everyone repeating how horrible torture is? I think that must be given.
It hasn't been obvious ever since the start of the War on Terror. At least not according to the Bush regime and people like Sam Harris or shows like 24. But me making that point might undermine the moral high ground of W. Civ.
PS: I have no involvement on the War on Terror, I don't agree that torture can be good under any conditions.
Can you please stop mischaracterising my post and explaining me what I said? Thank you.
And what's the apparent takeaway from that? That Western Civ might lose its moral high ground. But what about example No. 19280 of the CIA doing some henious shit? What about No. 19279? ...
Whence this alleged moral high ground?
The West has lost its brightness, its shine, its power of attraction (if one ignores the material thing), the reasons for that are numerous and I don't see any way to bring back the "end of history"-times (i.e. the complete dominance of the West when it comes to its cultural and societal influence) many were dreaming about in the 1990s.
The sheer wackiness of David Icke's Antisemitism (where 'reptile brains' are coda for Jews) never ceases to amaze me.
Many people call [the limbic system] the "Lizard Brain,” because the limbic system is about all a lizard has for brain function. It is in charge of fight, flight, feeding, fear, freezing up, and fornication.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/where-addiction-meet...
Given that we don’t have all, or even most, of the data, that’s really just emotionally driven speculation.
And maybe I’m being overly nuanced, but I’m beginning to accept that there’s a qualitative difference between distasteful treatment of dozens of people suspected of having information about terrorists, and the systematic persecution of entire populations.
I’m not terribly concerned that China, Russia, or anyone else is going to snatch and torture random nobody like me, and then justify it by pointing to CIA torture of Al Queda.
E.g. you have a virtual certainty that a dirty bomb is going to be detonated in NYC and will kill 1M+ and potentially irradiate the city for decades. Is torturing one person who you know with certainty knows the location of the bomb defensible?
Basically, how many lives would you be willing to sacrifice to prevent the suffering of a single person?
Yes, it's possible to concoct a fictional scenario whereby torturing one person saves millions of lives. Heck, why not a more plausible scenario where torturing someone saves 2 lives. But it's a non-sequitur: a true statement that is irrelevant.
I won't argue this well, especially not well enough to convince someone for whom "torture" is acceptable, but principles matter. It's the only thing that separates the good guys from the bad guys. Not guns, not good looks, not firm jaws, not money, not power, not magical spells. Bad and good people have, or don't have, those things in equal measure.
Torture = bad guy. Beating people in the street = bad guy. Planting evidence on a suspect = bad guy. Stealing elections = bad guy.
This is important because, while some of those things might be expedient to get your desired outcome, it makes society worse. If you do that, you are the bad guy. Maybe the other guy is bad too, but you definitely are. Now when other people do it, you can't say shit. You did it. You could not come up with a better way. Society is now worse and more dangerous because of you. All the bad guys have reasons for doing bad things, but only good guys do the good things, even when it's not easy. Good people say "times are extraordinarily dangerous, so now more than ever we must fight to maintain our integrity and our values, and treat our opponents with due process and dignity, no matter how much we despise them"
We now have a society where torture is considered awful, but that is hard won. Not long ago, we would burn people alive publicly as punishment for Very Serious reasons. When we start saying "torture is ok now because these times are extraordinarily dangerous", then torture is a bit more acceptable when times are not so dangerous.
That's it. That's the argument.
The problem is that these quandaries are then used to justify shitty behavior in other circumstances. What percentage of cop beatings save lives versus total cop beatings? 0.2%? 0.02%? What's the point of your question? What does the knowledge that you will be beaten if a cop suspects you of a terrible crime do to your state of mind? To the safety of police officers? To society?
I'm concocting a situation that I would like you to consider. Answer, please, with just as much gravitas. Let us imagine a society where beating or harassing anyone is absolutely taboo. In this society, no one need ever worry about physical violence. A woman could walk naked from Chicago to California never once being harassed. An elderly man could walk anywhere carrying a fat wallet of cash without fear of physical violence.
There is the rare and occasional thief, however. Now, one of these thieves steals a car and leaves a child baking in the sun in much the circumstances you describe. Beating the thief is the only possible way to save the child from a grizzly, horrendous, agonizing death, screaming alone for her mother.
But, once done, the beating breaks that taboo. Those police officers are a bit more likely to use violence to get what they want. It's a bit contagious, too. Other people begin to use violence. Bear with me, here. Let's say, because that taboo is broken, 100 more people are beaten over the next decade, and 1 or 2 of them die from their injuries. None of them "deserve" it.
Would you say it was worth it, to beat the man to save the life of that child, knowing that 1 or 2 people die and 100 are beaten, directly because of that?
Not really. It was a story that a philosophy book used to illustrate a conundrum. It bore resemblance to "actually happened" like a film "based on true events". Are we taking the word of the cops and philosophers or does the man himself have something to say about it? What would have happened if the cops didn't beat the man? We will never know.
But ok, let's grant it, for the sake of argument. For our purposes, it is the unvarnished reality, precisely as the book said. The cops had to beat the man or the child would have died.
The beating of the man had unknown consequences, however, and the construction of the scenario elides them. Is it worth it to live in a society where cops beat thieves to extract information from them? We don't have to guess. Look around you (I mean, assuming you live in the US or similar country in that respect). Do cops only beat men to extract life-saving information from them? The unintended consequence of "it's okay to beat this man just this once" is readily apparent. It never is just the once in that exceedingly rare scenario, is it?
Now, you can answer my question. In the magical society where cops do not beat people, but then do, is 100 beatings and 1 or 2 deaths worth the life of 1 child?
As it happens, we know what would've happened had the police not beat him, because they tried that first. The man refused to say where the car was. He would rather let a child die than admit to car theft. Of course, maybe, if they had let the child die a magic genie would've prevented all future crime - it's as plausible as your hypothetical - so maybe the police did wrong after all...
As for your question my moral judgements are tuned to reality, not nonsense fantasy land. I don't have a strong sense of what is right and wrong in a universe that does not obey causality as I know it. I would, however, be willing to beat the thief if it were my child in the car.
> Would you say the police did anything wrong?
Yes, obviously. At the very least, they very obviously broke a law. They should file charges against themselves. The legal system is not absolute and a court / jury can decide about extenuating circumstances.
I can think of few laws that don't allow me to construct some extremely hare-brained counterexample where it might be morally justified to break them.
Laws are ethics - they are rules that tell us how to act. Right and wrong are descriptions of morality - which is about good and bad. It's certainly a violation of the clearly established rules to beat a man to save a child, but it's not obviously wrong to do so. I would say it's not wrong at all.
I don't think that's a fair interpretation of what was said. The claim made was that they broke the law, which is wrong to do on deontological grounds, especially for the institution tasked by society with enforcing the law. They may be justified by utilitarian ethics, but a police department setting the precedent of "if we believe the need is great enough, we are free to ignore the law" is both wrong and illegal. That's the fundamental principle at stake here - the same base argument that leads governments to suspend civil rights for the sake of security. "It is terrible for these people to die, so we need more power to prevent it." A ratcheting system that cedes ever more ground to autocratic forces. It's not like this process has been particularly hidden from us; there are many here who remember the US before the PATRIOT Act was put in place, after all.
The cost of not beating this thief might have been a child's death. The cost of beating him is instilling a norm that police have the right to beat prisoners. And because the change in societal norms is so slow, and the grief of a dead child so sudden, this always seems like a good trade. You would be a monster for saying that the rights of a car thief are worth a dead child. Until police prisoners have no rights. Until political prisoners have no rights. Until people have no rights.
End-to-end encryption is evil! Only a criminal would want to hide their activities from the police! A social credit system rewards pro-social activity and prevents instability! This state of emergency is only temporary - life will return to normal very soon! A surveillance state is much safer than a free one. As long as you have no issue with the state.
The civil rights we benefit from are measured in the blood of innocents. As cold-hearted as it is to say, if we are not willing to allow innocent people to die to protect civil rights, we will not have them for long.
That...depends on your chosen deontological framework. In deontological ethics some acts are morally obligatory (or prohibited) independent of their effects on human welfare, but which acts are obligatory or prohibited depends on the deontological framework selected.
You could select a deontological framework where “obedience to the letter of the law” is always morally obligatory, but I think most people who subscribe to deontological ethics would nonetheless reject that framework.
I would say yes they were in the wrong. It was a bad choice even if its one I would likely make myself. Maybe the insistence that morality is strictly on a continuum from "good" to "bad" is part of the issue.
In theory since the case is so trivial they could be convicted and immediately given complete presidential pardon with clean record or whatever is the equivalent.
Or jury nullification can be used. There would be no way I as a juror would declare them guilty.
"Torture is bad and should be abolished".
"Well, what about this other, very contrived situation where it's good?"
You can use that non-sequitur to justify literally anything. "Murder, slavery and rape is bad". "Well, what about this situation where it did good?"
There are only people who inexplicably insist that a tortured non-sequitur is a pro-torture counterfactual.
You attack the problem with the rule of law, not unleashing your justice system from the reins of lawful behavior whenever they internally deem it convenient.
Turning it around, how would you like if the police tortured your child in a case of mistaken identity? Looking at the members of my high school class who became cops, they weren't exactly known for being the brightest bulbs in the box, but always acted with confidence despite that.
No, it's not, and the divergence between reality and this description is increasing, essentially monotonically, over time, with legal incorporation of “victim’s rights” into the criminal justice process.
That's not to say it shouldn't be as you describe, just that it isn't.
https://www.justice.gov/usao/resources/crime-victims-rights-...
They don't extend to the decision making process for others' investigations and prosecutions.
Yes? They beat the man.
Should they have done it (acted wrongly)? I don't know, they have their own free will.
> In a 2014 paper published in the Social and Personality Psychology Compass, researchers criticized the use of the trolley problem, arguing, among other things, that the scenario it presents is too extreme and unconnected to real-life moral situations to be useful or educational.
I can't say, how I would react in a given situation. I don't know, if I could torture/kill one (or a few) for the survival (or a better chance of survival) of a larger group. Because in the end one would have to ask were to draw the line. From a strictly utilitarian point of view killing one person to secure the survival of two others is a net positive outcome. But it feels morally more than wrong.
Where to draw the line. 1 against 50? Against 1000?
Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" [1, 2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ones_Who_Walk_Away_from_Om...
[2] Full short story: https://learning.hccs.edu/faculty/emily.klotz/engl1302-6/rea...
Well of course all sorts of definitive truths feel unintuitive or wrong to humans, perhaps that's just a limitation of our brains. From this utilitarian pov the net positive outcome is the morally correct one.
Utilitarianism isn't a rational choice. What if - in my extreme example, one of the two surviving people would have been Hitler?
Or even less dramatic, still contrived: What if the person being killed would go on and invent a cure against cancer?
You can't predict the future and these contrived examples only show, that (probably) every theory/philosophy can be brought to its knees by going to its extreme conclusions. So how to quantify "value"? How do we calculate the consequences of our decisions? We can't imho.
There is math, right? 2 > 1?
> What if the person being killed would go on . . .
Don't worry about it. If they would cure cancer, redux hitler, etc, they will even if not seen here. Flip your coin; accept the result; one's feelings afterward don't offend the multiverse.
Ahhhhh I see. No need for many wise people discussing implications of actions and values for hundreds of years. Just throw in 4 words, 2 numbers and 1 logical operator. Eureka: Philosophy is solved.
> one's feelings afterward don't offend the multiverse.
Your solution seems to be "religion" providing consolidation.
I could absolve myself with the "Many worlds interpretation" into thinking that I don't need to care for the consequences of my actions and "accept the result".
The same way I can be absolved by a priest and still imagine myself joining the nice people in "heaven". For me personally it sadly just doesn't work that way.
In my worldview actions (or inactions) have consequences. Being an adult made me realize that I have responsibilities. And that I need to accept that I need to take these serious. One example:
If I step out of my door tomorrow and find a little crying baby on my doorstep with no one else in sight - while not at fault for the situation - I would still be responsible for this little human being. At least until there is a solution that relieves me from said responsibility. Until such a moment I need to step up and act.
The same for if I refrain from killing one person to rescue hundreds/thousands (or even just two), the consequences of my actions are my responsibility. They weigh on my consciousness. The same if I decide to rescue others by acting and torturing/killing someone.
If I act in self-defense or the defense of others ("Notwehr" and "Nothilfe" in German) I am still responsible. I might be acquitted in court. But I still need to step up and defend myself in court. I am responsible for my actions as well as for my inactions. The latter just is more easy on our consciousness (at least that is what psychology tells us).
Philosophy begins there, not ends https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagoras
> Being an adult made me realize that I have responsibilities. And that I need to accept that I need to take these serious.
Ok Atlas. Don’t close the thought without the realization you have limits, that your mind is finite. If you pick up the baby, is it made of tar? Are you Horton, or do you call up the child welfare authorities and release the baby to someone else’s care?
In a worldview of responsibility for consequences of one’s actions, from where do those actions come? Are they not the consequence of other actions from within or out? It action-consequence-responsibility a graph or a fabric of interrelations?
Unfortunately, that has little practical impact.
I can construct a lot of scenarios where I build an amazing startup and become a billionaire seemingly overnight.
Tragically, my bank account balance always seems to ignore the brilliant scenarios my mind comes up with.
Honestly, outside of philosophy departments questions like this aren't terribly useful.
The problem with your question is that ignores the specific circumstances of this case - where there obviously was no dirty bomb, there was no "certainty", there were not one million lives at stake in some definite deterministic sense.
I disagree completely. The fact that you can construct such a scenario says something very important about it. That it is not totally morally indefensible and the discussion is not one about a binary choice but one about degree.
Basically do we have any examples of this sort of situation, where there was an imminent threat to life and people were saved due to torture?
Most evidence points the other direction.
> Finally, an exhaustive 2014 report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence analyzed millions of internal CIA documents related to the torture of terrorism suspects, concluding that “the CIA's use of its enhanced interrogation techniques was not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation from detainees.” It adds that “multiple CIA detainees fabricated information, resulting in faulty intelligence.” https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/we-rsquo-ve-known...
https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/publ...
In the made up scenario you could make a case that even if there is a low probability of torture working, the scale of lives saved would make it worth it. A 20% chance of saving 1M people is still net +200k lives.
Sure it is. But if torture was limited to only cases as clear-cut as the one you propose, it would be virtually non-existent.
For such rare, extreme cases, it's better to keep it illegal, and hope an interrogator will risk jail to save the million people (and possibly be freed by jury nullification), than (effectively) legalizing it, and have its use creep to anyone merely suspected of terrorism (as defined by, from the point of view of the torture victims, an invading force), by an organization unaccountable even to citizens of its own country.
Well I believe this is technically still the case in the US.
No. No, there is no such scenario. You can coerce the information out of someone who has the knowledge in other ways, if that is the problem, even though that problem never actually surfaces outside of bad TV show plots.
Torture is wrong. It does not work. It often, in fact, does the opposite of work. It debases our humanity, our civility, and society. It makes the world a worse place in so many ways, I find it sad that otherwise intelligent people are even pondering this.
No. Torture is not morally, legally, or ethically acceptable.
Riddle me that and you'll have answered your own question and hopefully had an epiphany along the way.
In these extreme edge cases the people on the ground can be expected to break the law and break out the thumb screws. After all if you're willing to torture someone your own freedom is presumably a relatively mild price to pay... right?
We could then hope that the citizens enforcing the legal system will recognize the correctness of their actions and let them off.
Legal torture exists because the powerful don't see themselves as answering to anyone.
It the same issue when the police and prosecutor know all facts with certainty. At this point you don't need a court, a judge or a jury. In an artificial system where everything is know with perfect certainty you don't even need police and prosecutors, just a method to punish the guilty. A legal system is only needed in order to determine who is guilty and who isn't, and this is unnecessary if we know already who is guilty.
We know with some uncertainty the murder rate each year, and from this we have some measurable number that a person might be murdered. But we also know that murders tend to occur in non-random ways. At what murder rate should we start to arrest people at random?
They are fun thoughts experiments, but as guides for real life they work about as good as extreme simulations which removes mass, gravity and air friction.
Exact same reasoning as "thou shalt not brutally beat epileptic children, to try to cure them by driving the demons out".
No matter what principals you hold I can come up with a scenario where you will violate them. It does not make you unprincipled.
States using torture is a long way down the hole. It is such a shame that a dynamic exciting creative society like the USA's has fallen so far. It would be possible for the country to be a beacon of hope and civilisation. Instead it has become just another in a long line of grubby corrupt super states.
Such a crying shame.
What you have to do is credibly threaten to torture or kill their family members and loved ones, to rape their children. This works. Are you a bad enough dude to rationalize that?
Probably many are, but for a person crazy enough to do such a horrible act such threats would also likely not work (either "nothing to lose" or "don't care about anything anymore").
As a society I think we can only try to avoid creating enough people who have "nothing to lose" or "don't care about anything anymore"... They're basically "cancer cells", once at least one survives long enough to "do it's thing" (recruit team, deploy destructive thing etc.), there's nothing you can do besides damage control, you don't "interrogate a cancer cell", they're either irrational, or have no rational reason to help you regardless of any threat or pain you apply.
But you're right, torture would only work for "regular criminals/terrorists" for which... one shouldn't need torture, threats and rewards for collaboration would be enough. But these "regular bad guys" would not do stupid s like mass attacks on "civilians".
Generally if you end up thinking you absolutely need actual torture you've already f up badly, you're seeing things wrong, and sooner or later s will hit the fan for you or your organization... it's more of a sign of incompetence!
War isn't crazy, and participating in attacks on [your country] doesn't mean that one is irrational or doesn't care about anyone in the world. Just because you are willing to give your own life for a cause doesn't mean you have nothing to lose.
The reason I say it works is because it actually works, and has been used by states many times, esp. in South America by US trained torturers, but also by plenty of others, like the Khmer Rouge. The point is credibility - and if somebody has planted a dirty bomb in some city, you can't credibly give them any reward for telling on themselves. You can promise things, but they will not believe you. If you're Pinochet, though, you can credibly threaten to have someone's children raped and murdered, because he did it all the time. He can credibly promise to do it even after the bomb goes off, and after you've been executed, because he's done it to others. He can have them brought to you and have it done in front of you.
The US also uses this tactic, although since it will never carry it out (although it will carry out deportations, indictments, etc. for family members) it relies on a lot of playacting. There are stories of the US pretending to torture family members within earshot of people being interrogated.
Planting a dirt bomb in a civilian inhabited city is way beyond war... 99.9% soldiers fighting in a war would not participate in anything similar to this... Even when a city is bombed to the ground, that generally happens well after beginning of a conflict and most people have been at least given one chance to run away or surrender... Most people who plan their lives well enough have a decent chance to at least evacuate vulnerable people from war zones (at high cost, sacrifice, but still).
The propaganda people currently trying to blur such lines are CRIMINAL imo...
> like the Khmer Rouge
Not sure how well this (or anything else) worked for them... afaik they ended up massacring a large part of their civilians population because they were paranoid and couldn't figure out who to trust, or had crazy ideas about who the ideal future citizens should be...
Yeah, sure, torturing enemy fighters to give away military secrets probably works just fine, just don't do it on a large enough scale or you'll just motivate the enemy to faith-to-death instead of risking to get captured... and this would likely nullify any advantage you'd gain.
There's a big gap between "regular war" and "total unrestricted violence and terror", that's why we talk of "war crimes"...
It was absolutely monstrous, and designed to back up (mostly) false statements of Soviet, Vietnamese and US infiltration, and that certain nationalities sand ethnic groups were collectively working to sabotage the government. Torturers were trained with pseudoscience, such as claims that if you strangle a victim and their heart rate increases, they are lying.
The result was the Cambodian communist party splitting and joining with the Vietnamese to expunge Pol Pot, and the Cambodian Genocide. I don't know how exactly any of this 'worked'. It did the opposite of create a secure state and confessions were merely used as an excuse to justify the existing hatreds of the Khmer Rouge.
I mean, you're probably not torturing average-Joe working-in-an-office with 2.5 kids and a white fence house :)
Taking you apart for your organs can be used to save the lives of multiple people.
So, I'd say, in your case, three or four, tops.
I don't imagine that was the answer you were looking for.
Fixing terrorism by more surveillance, torture, less rights might delay the detonation of a dirty bomb but since the core issue remains nothing is solved.
Besides, there are very effective techniques against information extraction through torture, like dividing organisations into cells.
IMHO, if it comes to torture 1 person to save 1M+ people there's likely to be another person who you will fail to catch and that person will take down the 1M+. I don't believe that the scenario of torturing 1 person and saving 1M+ exists beyond games and movies.
After years of torture, dronning and gunning people, the US left Afghanistan and people were falling from the skies when trying to run away. Did you miss that? Why do you think that torture can be an effective tool?
I absolutely do not believe governments should be able to torture someone, for any reason, regardless of the consequences. It has less to do with the suffering of a single person, and more with the constant and consistent scope creep that enters every government program coupled with the ability for any and all governments to be full of faceless, and therefore blameless, bureaucrats.
Torture to save 1 million people today becomes torture to save 10 people tomorrow. If no one can be held accountable, then it becomes torture to stop a robbery instead of genocide.
If you let your morals slip once, you are an immoral society. Like it or lump it.
Edit to clarify: I am 100% anti-torture in any situation. I didn't think that needed clarification?
No this is nothing more but a sleazy attempt to whitewash a crime
I'm not sure how to re-word that to clarify.
-- Fyodor DostoevskyIt is a travesty and a tragedy, but morally, if I did my best within the bounds of the law, what else is there? If there is no rule of law, what's the purpose of the whole thing? If torture is negotiable, why not speeding? Why not kidnapping (which might be implied in the torture)? Why not eliminating the right to a fair trial (again, maybe that's implied)?
If I disassemble you and redistribute your body parts, I could save several people who are in dire need of a heart, some kidneys, some blood.
Should I just go ahead and do this? If not, why not?
Someone stole the car with the baby inside. Police caught the thief, but there is no car or the baby. There is a heatwave and the baby can last max 2h in the car. The thief panicked and dumped the car somewhere. He is not willing to tell where it is.
Beating him up to get the info is acceptable ethically.
edit: Americans (and others) have been taught to believe in torture like a religion, to continue to associate torture with truth. Torture is an argument; you're arguing with people that it's in their best interest to do what you want them to do. It is rarely an appropriate argument, and rarely an effective argument. It's far easier and more effective to convince them that cooperating with you is the right thing to do, and that's still not easy. But there are tactics, such as complete isolation and control over their environment, rewards for any sort of cooperation, friendliness and human connection, actual rhetoric and discussion, periods of complete disorientation alternated with periods of calm, pandering to their egos. They don't work in two hours.
Make no mistake, no US citizen outside of the political class benefits from this or other atrocities. The exact same goes for the surveillance programs.
Losing the moral high ground degrades the whole society.
The whole anti establishment movement rallies around stuff like this. The lefties and the right-wingers will be after different things but they will be able to come together on the hypocritical stance and corruption of the current system. It unites enemies against you who think that the most important thing is to bring down the current horrible governance and figure out things later.