261–270 of 276 posts
Pretty sure it was metadata that allowed the US to locate and strike Zawahiri in Kabul with a predator drone. So safe to say the US isn’t going to stop doing this any time soon.
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Cool, I didn't know that. Now let's pardon her.
It's always up to the President, but in this case there's very little grounds to pardon her. Her actions were pretty cut and dry example of leaking classified material. If anything, a Presidential pardon from the current administration would be seen as a highly partisan move in an already politically-agitated climate and make everything worse.
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How about simply not murdering people on the other side of the world? Here’s a mental experiment for you: what would you do if Russia, lawfully (according to Russian laws) executed people in US? Because that’s exactly what US is doing to the rest of the world.
To make the parallel clear: If Russia executed people that were waging war against Russia from within the US, that the US had already convicted of making war on Russia, was the US also trying to capture or kill at the same time? I'd expect the US government to say "thank you".
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Number of victims of terrorist attacks on the other side of the world is orders of magnitude lower than number of victims of American invasions. Even 9/11 was a minor episode compared to the invasion it served as an excuse for. Essentially, you’re assuming US are always the good guys. And the easiest way to explain this is the foundation of all US politics: racism. Having said that, US _arr_ the good guys at the mome…
Is the US racist against all the Yemeni people and government who also wanted him dead?
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> Following that logic, drone striking you in your house is an active situation. No constitution needed. No, I obviously meant that you're allowed to kill as LEO _in response_ to an active situation. My point was that you haven't defined what an "active situation" is. I could say "we should only kill people when we have to" and that'd be accurate, but that'd be useless for the point of this conversation, which at thi…
> however, such things happen Source?
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That has more to do with the fact that Congress hasn't the backbone to call the Executive to heel on spending or transparency, or to empower OIG/GAO to pierce the national security veil. You can't make actionable tweaks to the system when the books are compartmentalized. None of that though doesn't cost money. Which is why I question the logic that Ad serving is somehow more responsive or accurate because a false-pos…
Congress is considerable source of explicit allowance for overages in such projects, including at times forcing politically popular purchases that military doesn't want. While forcing inefficiencies in procurement from projects having to buy votes by spreading production.
Many examples of the IC lying to Congress can be found with digging. Dirt can absolutely be dug up if Congress sees fit to do so. They just haven't seen fit to glex their oversight powers.
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> are continuously ashamed of things we did Maybe "ashamed" is too strong a word, but thinking smaller scale, if you look back at the way you handled things when you were younger, don't you think you could have done anything better? Isn't this how we learn and progress as a person? Seems likely to be true for a society as well.
I just riffed off the word "ashamed" from the parent comment. I probably could have described it differently if I wrote it without that context.
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Congress is considerable source of explicit allowance for overages in such projects, including at times forcing politically popular purchases that military doesn't want. While forcing inefficiencies in procurement from projects having to buy votes by spreading production.
Ah yes... The sordid NASA/pork barrel effect. I am aware. That's orthogonal to the fact that Congress, besides setting the budget is also tasked wit Oversight . I'm damn sure they've not done/doing a great job of it, because there are many members of the legislature who find themselves straight up lied to by the Executive, yet nothing is done in terms of consequences. Many examples of the IC lying to Congress can be…
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I'm not sure why this isn't upvoted beyond anything here. For them to even admit they've killed people based on metadata means they could kill you for your uncle's friend's mom being a terrorist.
Since the Obama administration, any male over the age of 16 we kill anywhere is retroactively considered a legitimate target regardless of any "proof" of their guilt. Obviously this is a horrific policy that is a fig leaf to cover up for mass murder. Everyone involved in these murders going back a decade should be on trial for their crimes. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/05/under-o...
Reminds me of the Vietnam war (or American war as it was referred to by the locals) where the US couldn’t say they were winning based on the amount of territory they held (because they couldn’t actually capture and hold much territory for very long). Instead, the “quantitative measurements” of McNamara’s computer systems could only show that they were “winning” the war based on the number of enemy combatants killed – with the result that any Vietnamese killed by US forces were retroactively recorded as Vietcong. Most of us are familiar with Goodhart's law regarding measures becoming targets so I’d be curious to know how much it applied to the Vietnam war.
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Similar to gmail and youtube suspension process. It happens to you, you or someone makes your case on social media, someone in google may listen and modify the policy rules.
And then you get your life back?