> Additional sessions of rectal feeding and hydration followed. In addition to his hunger strikes, Majid Klian engaged in acts of self-harm that included attempting to cut his wrist on two occasions, an attempt to chew into his arm at the inner elbow, an attempt to cut a vein in the top of his foot, and an attempt to cut into his skin at the elbow joint using a filed toothbrush.

Page 115

That is the cold truth of that statement. This is fucking disgusting, and someone needs to be held accountable.

The citizens of the United States need to be held accountable. Sorry, someone has to start looking at the root of the problem.

    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 [...]

The US has engaged more positively (but without any moves toward ratification or even retracting the purported retraction of its signature) with the ICC under the Obama Administration.

Start by phoning your representative's office. Today. Tomorrow. The day after that. Every day, ask for your representative's statement on CIA torture. Ask why they haven't condemned it more thoroughly; are they in favour of torture? What exactly are they going to do to make sure it doesn't happen again? Really? Just that? That's not enough. What else? Talk to your neighbours, friends, family, colleagues. Ask them to do the same. Send letters. Send eMails. Visit in person. Don't stop.

And not even just the US law. I'm sure what the Nazis did was totally legal by their own laws, and yet they were still punished. Some crimes supercede local laws.

I'm sure all the previous people who used politics to change things did indeed find it an easy ride. Martin King basically phoned in his efforts, didn't he? And I recall Pankhurst effected her changes with a single stern letter to the London Times.

In the end, these people need to be prosecuted in order to lock them up. That means the DoJ needs to do its job, but in the corrupt system of the US, it also means that Congress needs to understand the gravity of the situation.

Consider for a moment: you can vote for spam or canned tuna.

Hilarious.

How do you think you can stage a revolution with a minority of the population behind you, while the powers that be are as well-armed and as eager to use violence as they are in the US?

You've got a better chance of voting both parties out of office with a minority vote, and fixing the broken system that people are so disenchanted with.

Your mistake is that you believe that the options they're giving you are the only ones. You can make a third option. If you can get enough people behind you to stage a credible revolution, you can easily get enough people to vote for your third option.

It's totally true that the US electoral system is broken and corrupt and doesn't do justice to the vote of the people, but it's not yet to the point that the vote doesn't matter at all. People do still need to vote, and alternatives to the two ruling parties are still legal. You can take advantage of that to stage a much more peaceful revolution through the ballot box.

this that

you speak of rats.

---

geese. a world of peace

you stumble stammer

pound your fist

an’ i tell you there are no politics

you swear

tell me how much you care

---

you cheat the lunch counter man

out of a pack of cigarettes

an’ i tell you there are no politics

you tell me of goons’

graves. ginks an’ finks

an’ of what you’ve read

---

an’ how things should be

an’ what you’d do if . . .

an i say someone’s been

tamperin’ with your head

you jump

raise your voice

---

an’ gyrate yourself

t’ the tone of principles

your arm is raised

an’ i tell you there are no politics

in the afternoon you run

t’ keep appointments

---

with false lovers

an’ this leaves you

drained by nightfall

you ask me questions

an’ i say that every question

if it’s a truthful question

---

can be answered by askin’ it

you stomp

get mad

i say it’s got nothin’ t’ do with

gertrude stein

you turn your eyes

---

t’ the radio

an’ tell me what a

wasteland exists in television

you rant an’ rave

of poverty

your fingers crawl the walls

---

the screen door leaves black marks

across your nose

your breath remains on

window glass

bullfight posters hang crooked above your head

an’ the phone rings constantly

---

you tell me how much i’ve changed

as if that is all there is t’ say

out of the side of your mouth

while talkin’ on the wires

in a completely different

tone of voice

---

than you had a minute ago

when speakin’ t’ me about something else

i say what’s this about changes?

you say "let’s go get drunk"

light a cigarette

"an’ throw up on the world"

---

you go t’ your closet

mumblin’ about the phoniness of churches

an’ spastic national leaders

i say groovy but

also holy hollowness too

yes hollow holiness

---

an’ that some of my best friends

know people that go t’ church

you blow up

slam doors

say "can’t no one say nothin’ t’ you"

i say "what do You think?"

---

your face laughs

you say "oh yeeeeeaah?"

i’m gonna break up i say

an’ reach for your coat

‘neath piles of paper slogans

i say your house is dirty

---

you say you should talk

your hallway stinks as

we walk through it

your stairs tilt drastically

your railing’s rotted

an’ there’s blood at the

---

bottom of your steps

you say t’ meet bricks with bricks

i say t’ meet bricks with chalk

you tell me monster floor plans

an’ i tell you about a bookie shop

in boston givin’ odds on the presidential

---

race

i’m not gonna bet for a while i say

little children

shoot craps

in the alley garbage pot

you say "nothin’s perfect"

---

an’ i tell you again

there are no

politics

----

Bob Dylan - some other kinds of songs.

Working in groups is what makes it so damn easy to discredit, re-brand and dilute movements. Protesting? C'mon, we're way past the useful application of protesting.

Anyone not doing that, is guilty of condoning this crime, and ensuring that it can and will happen again in the future.

The best thing a "citizen" can do is recognize the state is foundationally unethical and has no legitimate political authority and never did. [1] Once we leave behind the mysticism of state authority, perhaps we can find better ways to organize society in ways that are ethically sound.

[1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Problem_of_Political_Auth...

You need people on your side. You need a majority of Americans on your side. And once you've got that, you can vote the politicians out of office, elect some better ones, and finally see justice done. And maybe before that, you can use the threat of this happening to get the current crop of politicians to finally care about justice.

The root of the problem didn't start at the voting booth, "Oh I'll check yes to torture those terrorist", or "I'm going to write my Congressmen telling them to torture some folks". In fact Congress voted to outlaaw waterboarding: http://www.reuters.com/article/2008/02/14/us-security-usa-wa... (although it was vetoed by President Bush). This report will help to further clamp down on brutal interrogation techniques. It will push Congress and President Obama to resolve the issue. The CIA, in fact mislead any type of oversight over the torture programs. So instead of jumping to "we're all blame" conclusions, why don't you blame the people in charge that secured the funding for these officers to do it?

When the institution that is performing these acts out-and-out lies about the impact and severity, how can random citizens be held accountable? That honestly makes no sense to me.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisoner...

>When the institution that is performing these acts out-and-out lies about the impact and severity, how can random citizens be held accountable? That honestly makes no sense to me.

because the institutions and individuals doing it know that they will go unpunished once the truth gets discovered. Whenever stuff like this surfaces nobody gets punished and thus the citizens/society give clear approval to the actions that have already been perpetrated and to perpetrate it in the future as long as visibility of convenient "ignorance" is maintained.

[0]: https://twitter.com/Ethan_Heilman/status/542386688329125888/...

[1]: https://twitter.com/Ethan_Heilman/status/542385586313502720/...

[2]: https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/1376...

If you are not interested in someone torturing on your behalf, you need to speak out, and loudly.

It's people. It's people among us.

It's sickening.

The common man is even more detached from the powers that be than previously assumed (which was already low).

We knew - we knew - that detainees were being tortured. We didn't know how many; nor for how long; nor the exact methods; but we did know that it was happening.

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/todays-cia-critics-on...

2. There is abundant proof that the US engaged in a deliberate, not occasional, policy of torture, whitewashed as "enhanced interrogation techniques".

3. There is so far no proof that other western nations have recently had a policy of deliberate torture, except for the sad cases where the US creatively outsourced some of its torture needs to Poland and perhaps a few other eastern european countries.

Other Western nations facilitated capture and detention, they are helped get people to the CIA. So you are seriously telling me that they didn't suspect? Really???

Look, the EU is willing to drag planes from the sky to support the US in getting Snowden, so you think they don't know what the CIA was doing? Really???

in reality, everything is excused when it is against the enemy. but even then, the problem here is that 1) most things were done just out of sadism. for no real benefit. US tax payers pretty much paid for a BSDM dungeon for some sick CIA operatives. 2) several cases caught lawful citizens and great pains were taken to make it look like nothing happened.

This is meaningless if you get to define any innocent/held-without-charge person as 'enemy'.

> These violations included physical and sexual abuse, torture, rape, sodomy, and murder.

> In 2004, Antonio Taguba, a major general in the U.S. Army, wrote in the Taguba Report that a detainee had been sodomized with "a chemical light and perhaps a broomstick."[30] In 2009, Taguba stated that there was photographic evidence of rape having occurred at Abu Ghraib.[31] An Abu Ghraib detainee told investigators that he heard an Iraqi teenage boy screaming, and saw an Army translator having sex with him, while a female soldier took pictures.[32] A witness identified the alleged rapist as an American-Egyptian who worked as a translator. In 2009, he was the subject of a civil court case in the United States.[31] Another photo shows an American soldier apparently raping a female prisoner.[31] Other photos show interrogators sexually assaulting prisoners with objects including a truncheon, wire and a phosphorescent tube, and a female prisoner having her clothing forcibly removed to expose her breasts.

> In other instances of sexual abuse, soldiers were found to have raped female inmates, and senior U.S. officials admitted that rape had taken place at Abu Ghraib.[33][34] Some of the women who had been raped became pregnant, and in some cases, were later killed by their family members in what were thought to be instances of honor killing.[35]

Fuck the police.

Just take two hours of your day. Strip naked, have someone throw a bucket of cold water over you, and then stand on a letter-size piece of paper for two hours in a room that is 15C

>Oh my god they were quite chilly

And abducted, held without trial, tortured, waterboard, anal raped, threatened, beaten againast a wall, and other things besides. A lot of them while also being totally inoccent (and in any way, without trial).

What exactly have you suffered besides a comfy middle class existance that gives you the moral superiority to laugh at that?

Would you also laugh at jews in Dr. Mengele's cold exposure experiments being "a little chilly"?

Absolutely. Abduction, held without trial, dehumanizing conditions, torture, etc.

Does your outrage about the jewish civilians only begin at the point were they burned them too?

Second, there are three levels of evil here, even if you disagree about "how many were totally innocent".

1) Some of them being totally innocent without dispute (for example those that were even released as such - in one case I read about after 7 years (!), and others for which they admitted they knew it for the start but used them as leverage, etc).

2) Even for the guilty, there should be no inprisoment without due process and fair trial.

3) Even for proven guilty, there should be no torture.

I don't consider anyone who does not agree on (2) and (3), basic tennets of human rights in the civilized world, anything more progressed than a KKK member lynching blacks back in the day...

Well, yeah, its called (naturally enough) the straw man fallacy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man

(FWIW: You are not the first one I ask about this.)

Why? Because people are so quick to judge without even trying once to see why the others are doing what they do.

I just think it is a bad idea to poke fun at it. There are times for funny remarks on serious stuff. I think you'll find that this is not it.

How about the humor in sentences about raping?

Second, the idea that terrorists (especially as arbitrarily defined, without trial and due process, for years on end) should be tortured is still problematic.

Third, yes they are out of whack. The decent human priorities would be to have the same sympathies for all victims, and the same demand for human rights to be applied in both cases.

Not on Hacker News it isn't. We want people to apply the Principle of Charity and respond to the strongest reasonable interpretation of what each other is saying [1]. Alternatively,

A comment in reply to another comment should be written in the spirit of colleagues cooperating in good faith to figure out the truth about something, not politicians trying to ridicule and misrepresent the other side. [2]

It increasingly seems to me that we should add these principles to the site guidelines, though they're arguably derivable from them.

It's true that when people seem (and/or are) hopelessly wrong and misguided, and no one else seems (and/or is) respecting these principles, there's a great temptation to say "fuck it" and let loose with snark. But that needs to be resisted. The community depends on you and other established users to set good examples. Otherwise how can we tell new users that they can't do the same—or rather, do worse, since these things always get worse?

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7445761

There's a kind of caricaturing wit that could be called uncharitable, but only if it's meant to distort, in which case the humor is a means to something else and it's the something else that's the problem.

One was in a hyperbolic rhetorical context, to exaggerate the distinction with killing someone, which we consider acceptable in war:

> So you're saying we shouldn't engage in torture because it's "bad"? It's okay to blow these same people up in the battlefield, but god forbid we throw water on them and put them in a slightly cold room?

One was self-referential:

> I'd be pretty happy if HN could muster the same uniform moral outrage about rape jokes involving non-terrorists (e.g. gamergate) as it has shown in response to my comment about terrorists being cold.

One was in response to 'reitanqild saying: "Most of us would much rather prefer to be shot dead or blown up in a split second than being even slightly tortured and locked up indefinitely."

> Throwing water on someone and leaving them in a 59-degree room is worse than shooting them dead? Keeping someone awake until they hallucinate is worse than shooting them dead? Really?

The cold room and the sleep deprivation were in response to the "slightly tortured" part of that comment.

At no point did I ever try to make the argument that "what the CIA did wasn't so bad because they just put people in cold rooms." I actually have no interest in trying to convince anyone that what the CIA did wasn't bad. This is not an issue that people are going to approach rationally. It's about gut-feelings--either you have a visceral reaction to these interrogation techniques or you don't.

You said elsewhere: "I don't think torture is ever justified, under any circumstances. No exceptions."

Well I strongly disagree. If it would actually save innocent lives,[1] I'd have absolutely no qualms about any number of Al Qaeda terrorists being tortured. It's an unspeakably evil organization, promulgating ideologies that are at their best barbaric and backward. I think even the people that are receptive to their message and associate themselves with the organization, even if they do nothing more, are morally culpable.

And I imagine polls will show about half the country or more agreeing with me: http://mic.com/articles/106084/two-charts-show-why-the-cia-s.... Now of course the majority of people can be on the wrong side of history, but I don't think this is one of those situations.

[1] I've noted elsewhere that I don't think the techniques are effective and that we shouldn't be engaging in them for that reason.

Anyway, if you you have no interest in trying to convince people, why are you here discussing this? You're certainly giving every appearance of trying to convince people. You're putting forth arguments that look like they're intended to be convincing.

In another comment, you mentioned environmental disaster as something that should rank higher. Do you also endorse the use of torture on unrepentant polluters, climate change skeptics, and the like? Or is terrorism somehow special in your eyes?

And I couldn't care less how many people agree with you. I can't understand why you would even bring that up.

Anyway, at no point did I ever say we should torture anyone. In fact I said exactly the opposite in response to 'angibrowl. But at the end of the day I have better places to use my limited moral outrage than on how Khalid Sheik Mohammad was treated.

To be honest, what really kept me participating in this thread is the comparison to Japanese and Jewish persecution. I just can't understand the point of view of people who focus on the action alone, to the exclusion of who is the target of the action. I think it matters that these guys are scumbags.

Who decides what constitutes "scumbaggery"? You? Me? A random person off the street? A CIA lawyer? The President?

This sounds like a recipe for disaster, frankly. It sounds like a recipe for treating some minorities as non-humans, on a not very formal basis.

There's a thin line between "this guy is a scumbag because he's part of al Qaeda" and "this guy is a scumbag because he's a Republican." This is why we have due process. Or rather, why we're supposed to have it, even though we've given up on it for al Qaeda, or for people we think are related.