This kind of seems to be a combined strategy. I mean this is not old;
many of us may still remember Abu Ghraib and so forth. We now have a
somewhat comparable situation: build up of enemies. See ICE raids and
videos manhunting people. There always are people susceptible to do
so (e. g. inflict pain onto others). The strange thing is how some
"democracies" do that. Where is the net difference to a dictatorship?
This is also blurred. You have a similar problem in Israel - again,
tons of examples that can be given, but it seems as if this is a combined
strategy originating from the top (of command chains).
The article claims that the torture box ("confinement box") is the worst
torture, but some 20 years ago we had the same with waterboarding. I see
a repeat of older patterns here. I wonder what those who torture other
people think.
Waterboarders follow a mind-breaking formation in a dedicated military base where they are desensitized to torture by subjugating themselves to it first!
Anyway I don't like the article's take. It seems to blame this on an institutional drift into sadism. I don't think it's the full story, there must be a strategy behind it.
Inducing trauma so that migrants don't ever think about coming back? Maybe coupled with Palantir machine learning insights to identify those who need/respond to this treatment?
>Well, if we did this to these Terrorists there, why not to these other Criminals here…
Simplistic. These guys are part of a hierarchy.
>"EVERYTHING WE SAY, they can see." The end result of mass surveillance is mass murder.
Well no it's meant for targeted murder.
>You should not oppose this simply because it is coming, at some point in the future, for you. You should oppose this because it is happening to anyone. But it is coming for you.
> The article claims that the torture box ("confinement box") is the worst torture, but some 20 years ago we had the same with waterboarding.
I read an account of a fifteenth-century woman (IIRC) who had essentially been waterboarded, among other tortures. She testified that the waterboarding was by far the worst thing she endured, and would rather die than experience it again.
All republics are democracies. Not all democracies are republics. Some people seem to get confused about this and think that "democracy" means "direct democracy" only, and not any of the various sorts of indirect democracy.
To make this point crystal clear, “correcting” someone with “ackshually the US isn’t a democracy” is something poli sci departments break their freshmen of every single year.
The colloquial, broad sense of “democracy” is also how political scientists employ the term in most contexts. That is: the people who study this for a living are entirely OK with that usage. If they didn’t use that sense of the word they’d need another one to mean the same thing, because it’s very useful.
> To make this point crystal clear, “correcting” someone with “ackshually the US isn’t a democracy” is ...
it's not a democracy, when a large part of the population is barred from voting, and / or if your idea of a vote is giving power to legal persons more than to natural persons during the voting process.
but fine, let me rephrase, the US is not more a democracy than China, North Korea, Russia, or any other clown state that says "wE aRe dEmoCraCy". Having large swathes of your mostly illiterate and poverty-stricken population so badly brainwashed that they fly their flag in their personal LinkedIn Profile, or pride themselves as "patriots" with a red cap, does not make the country "democratic".
To put it even more bluntly: the way the US sees its population in Appalachia is how the rest of the world views the US.
On the upside it all makes great entertainment (see Sacha Baron Cohen's "Who is America" which first and foremost is a documentary and only secondly is Satire).
I'll do you one better, it's always been a bureaucracy, but even moreso following the end of the 1960s, after the beginning of the "meritocracy" myth within academia. In reality, the incoming well educated migrants (usually European) in the mid 1950s were extremely nepotistic to their own groups, such as the Irish entering Wall street, and hiring only other Irish stockbrokers, or Italian small business owners in New York. They essentially replaced or married the old money and became a noveau riche that's still in the American status quo to this day. There is a new clique of sorts acting as a nepotistic noveau riche, mostly stemming from South or East Asia. Nepotism affects everyone and everywhere, but it's especially prevalent in the United States.
Also the great entertainment has been declining in quality, and it was always funded directly by the U.S. Government and Military to support their ideologies and agendas abroad. The Koreans are recently doing this to great success, and possibly China as well.
I see. I thought you meant "under Trump the US is not a democracy". Which I think is a pretty common opinion. But now I understand you meant "the US has never been a democracy".
What is going to change, and after what event? United States use of torture has been well known, documented and made into multiple movies and TV for the last decades. Multiple different governments have not only shown zero interest to charge people over it, but they have also given the green light to continue it. No president nor any candidate has shown even the slightest interest, nor has there been any grassroots movement that gone out on the street to demand accountability.
A thought that haunts me: a few hundred Venezuelan migrants were released from CECOT, but are there any deportees still stuck in there that we simply don’t know about? People without loved ones or a paper trail serving a hellish life sentence for a misdemeanor? If they exist, will anyone ever be able to get them out?
These people are not enemy combatants, or spies, or even foreign nationals. Uusually thery are immigrants in the process of getting citizenship. There is no argument for torturing these people. This is just psychotic cruelty.
No, it hasn’t. The CIA didn’t do this under Clinton because it’s a war crime, and Cold War Republicans prided themselves on saying we were better than e.g. the Viet Cong. The Bush cadre broke the U.S. law written just a few years before by their own party[1] by adopting techniques American forces were trained could be used against them if they were captured, not things which were previously sanctioned.
Obama’s greatest moral failing was not having war crimes trials. There is a direct line between the Bush-era embrace of torture abroad and the mistreatment we’re now seeing domestically.
Out of curiosity, do you know if these events get taught in history lessons in American schools? I'm by no means throwing shade here - I'm a Brit and our history lessons barely mentioned the unending list of atrocities Britain committed in the name of empire.
Yepper. Trail of Tears, German/Japanese internment are all primary education topics. Now interestingly, I don't think Bush has made it into the history books yet, but I don't have kids, so can't verify current day education materials.
What I find interesting is the bits we leave out. Like we touch on the Banana Republics, but the annex of Hawaii and how that was skulduggerously done is completely skimmed over.
There was, in fact, but the proportion of German (and Italian, also) nationals and citizens of German (and Italian) descent interned was far lower compared to the population of such foreign nationals and citizens than was the case for Japanese nationals and citizens of Japanese descent.
> White people got a pass.
Relatively speaking, yes, but there still were internments, including of US citizens based on German and Italian descent. (But with more individualized review before internment or eviction from coastal areas than was true of citizens of Japanese descent.)
A bit, but it varies some by state and most skip at least some things (do any cover labor struggles in the early 20th century?)
Ours stopped after (an extremely cursory coverage of) the ‘50s and ‘60 civil rights movement because there was no way to cover Vietnam and Nixon and such basically at all without greatly upsetting Republican parents. Anything newer than ~30 years (at the time) was treated as about as handsome-off as religion. Dunno if that’s changed.
The world has to modes: In one mode, we need people, as much as we can get, to make something bigger out of this world. In another mode, the world can no longer grow, so we divide, we conquer "the others" or be conquered.
The definition of the word "evil" changes depends on which mode we are in.
That's why Niccolò Machiavelli suggested that it is useful to be both loved and feared, it gives you the best chance when a challenge is facing you.
No, that's true, and I don't actually think that the world is divided into good and evil. Nor do I think anyone doing this really has anything to fear from the justice system.
But to the degree you can take a normal person and twist them into something horribly unfit for civil society, having them do torture is the way. It's the express lane to not seeing others as human, not even when they're in front of you, being tortured by you.
The death penalty is wrong, but I think there's a point where when you have politicians wielding massive amounts of power being willfully capricious that the crime is on a wholly different scale. They should be held to a higher standard and I think that higher standard can and should include harsher penalties in cases of crimes against humanity.
The argument that human rights are indivisible is contradicted by your statement right after as western civilization turns inwards on itself and begins removing human rights.
>Neither torture nor genocide is recognized anywhere as a human right. After WWII we held trials.
What do you want to tell me? Of course torture is not a human right. That doesn't change a bit that human rights apply to everyone. Even to the torturer. Sure, we should put him/her in prison for a long time but never does even the torturer loose his/her humanity. That is exactly what distinguishes us from the nazis/fascists.
Distinguishes us how? If you cannot lose your humanity through torture, can you lose it through mass murder? Or is humanity something you cannot ever take away from anyone? If so, the worst of the nazis still had it. Yet I do know that it can be taken away precisely because you can torture another person until they aren't themselves anymore. That is, in fact, the goal of torture.
Believing that the world is not divided into good and evil people also requires me to believe that people of the US have the same capacity for both good and evil as did the people of nazi Germany
Yes, they do. This is what "indivisible" in this context means. Of course they should be imprisoned but they are still humans with their human rights.
I know that this is hard for some to understand but retribution has it's limits. It is counter productive anyway. Just look at the USA. It's at the top of countries when it comes to the incarceration rate. Even Chinas incarceration rate is only ~1/5th compared to the USA. Norway is at a rate of ~1/10 of that of the USA. The American way clearly does not work. They put an unbelievable number of people in prisons where human rights are not guaranteed and yet they would still be much, much safer elsewhere. Their prísons grow criminals instead of citizens.
If you say: Nazis do not have human rights than where do you stop? Child molesters like Donald Trump? If human rights are relative and open to interpretation, there are no human rights.
if you say it out who you mean they'll call you a terrorist and lock you up, regardless if you're right. this is why this can't be solved peacefully or via "voting the right people". You essentially have a gulag that is somehow endorsed by all those who are voting either democrat or republican today. And to fix it would mean the current system is being taken down. But this remains unthinkable for most of the deeply propagandized general (US) public.
Just because they are not literally identical does mean they are unrelated. The author points this out and it sounds horrific.
> The four men interviewed by Amnesty International, as well as Florida-based organizations, told the organization about the ‘box’, described as a 2x2 foot cage-like structure located outside in the yard of “Alligator Alcatraz” where individuals are sent for punishment. Individuals are put in the ‘box’, their hands are shackled and their feet are attached to restraints on the ground. They are unable to sit down or move positions, and are forced to remain there for hours in the heat with hardly any water or protection from the sun, heat and insects. According to a man seeking safety, “People ended up in the ‘box’ just for asking the guards for anything. I saw a guy who was put in it for an entire day.”
> A "2x2 cage-like structure… [an] extremely small space that prevents sitting, lying or changing position" has dimensions startlingly reminiscent of those the Senate documented in the black sites. The major difference is that in Florida, the Small Box is exposed to the elements and constructed as a barred cage, whereas in Catseye, it was a closed structure inside the larger closed structure of the black site. And in Florida, the box is used as punishment. According to one of the Alligator Alcatraz survivors in the Amnesty report, people were put into the box simply for alerting the guards to someone's need for medication. "They were taken to 'the box' and punished for trying to help me," the person told Amnesty
I think if you ever get to the point where you're argument hinges on 'well actually it's torture but it's not THAT BAD of torture' you should really step back and analyze if your post is really worth making or not.
The article claims that the torture box ("confinement box") is the worst torture, but some 20 years ago we had the same with waterboarding. I see a repeat of older patterns here. I wonder what those who torture other people think.
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