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CIA agents who tortured are vulnerable to prosecution in any country

amanpour.blogs.cnn.com

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Re: CIA agents who tortured are vulnerable to prosecution in any country

#121

Post by cabalamat »

TylerJay wrote: post #117
claudius wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I was just following orders" has already been established as an insufficient defense in the 1946 Nuremberg trials and essentially all later trials against WW 2 war criminals. It is by now pretty well established that crimes against humanity in general and torture in particular are not justifiable.

What about when it is combined with duress? Like if you refused once and were told they would kill your family if you ever refused again or quit? I'm just curious. I agree with the spirit of the idea that following orders is not valid justification, but being under duress is a well-known and generally accepted justification for committing a crime. Can you shed any extra light on this?

> being under duress is a well-known and generally accepted justification for committing a crime

In what jurisdiction? duress (or necessity in general) is only rarely a valid defence in English law.

Re: CIA agents who tortured are vulnerable to prosecution in any country

#122

Post by Someone »

pmoriarty wrote: post #97
Someone wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, but I doubt it would be in the interest of those making the decision whether to prosecute. So, I fear it will not happen, at least not for a few decades, maybe a century or two. Yesterday, I heard this quote: "America is good. And if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great." (Reagan, 1983). Made me immediately think of gitmo.

The thing is, for a lot of people torturing "bad guys" (or even suspected bad guys) is good.

Call me an optimist, but I doubt that. The lesser of two evils, yes, but good? No. Add in a bit of "if I do not let it happen, I'll be voted out and somebody else will order it" (it's a rare politician who dares to tell the public that, unfortunately, there's little that can be done to fix a problem) and "it's better that a good guy like me minimizes the amount of badness than that someone truly evil does it", and we get where we are now.

Re: CIA agents who tortured are vulnerable to prosecution in any country

#123

Post by icantthinkofone »

a3n wrote: post #92
icantthinkofone wrote: post #85

Can anyone explain to me why stories like this are on HN?

There's the "of interest" clause. But more specifically, we talk a lot here about telecom and internet surveillance. It's good to raise up your head once in awhile and recognize that technical acts are not done for themselves, they're done for a larger goal. All of these breaches we talk about here by the US and other governments are much more than offenses against technology, they resolve up the tree to support poli…

But that's not the subject of this article.

Re: CIA agents who tortured are vulnerable to prosecution in any country

#124

Post by jmccree »

TheCoelacanth wrote: post #116
briandear wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To not understand the Senate representational system is to not understand that the explicit purpose of the Senate was to prevent the tyranny of the majority. That was the foundation of the U.S. Constitution. The Great Compromise of 1787 was expressway to ensure smaller states had their rights protected. Without that compromise, tax dollars could be voted to improve New York City while draining the economy of less pop…

Great, so instead of tyranny of the majority, we have tyranny of the minority.

Checks and balances. Wyoming has 1 representative in the house, California has 53. When you combine the house and the senate, it should (in theory) be much harder for a bill to pass without approval of both the majority of the states and the majority of the population.

Re: CIA agents who tortured are vulnerable to prosecution in any country

#125

Post by glomph »

rakoo wrote: post #53
caf wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you can sensibly infer anything of the sort from television ratings. As I recall, The Sopranos, Breaking Bad and Dexter all rated pretty well too.

Jack Bauer is supposed to be the good guy; good guys aren't supposed to use torture, yet he does. I don't know about other shows, did "good guys" use torture ? Were they able to walk away without any problems ?

Tony Soprano is the protagonist. He has people killed and kills people. He isn't set up as a villain.

Re: CIA agents who tortured are vulnerable to prosecution in any country

#126

Post by jmccree »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #91
jmccree wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The senate represents the states and the house represents the people. It would be entirely unfair if a small number of high population states could easily impose their will on a large number of small population states. States and their citizens gave up some of their sovereignty when they joined the union, and in return were promised some equitable form of representation, no matter the size of their population. Large…

>It would be entirely unfair if a small number of high population states could easily impose their will on a large number of small population states. Why? "States" are arbitrary lines drawn in the soil. Should everyone who wants more power just secede and form their own state, ad absurdum? Besides which, none of the actually existing countries with proportional-representation democracy have sent their rural regions t…

State borders are not any more arbitrary than the border between Canada and the US. In the US, "States" are sovereign states that gave up some limited amount of sovereignty to join the Union. They are not simply administrative divisions like in other countries. The Constitution established a limited role for the federal government of the United States and reserved all other powers to the individual states.

It may seem like a historical relic now, but each state joined the union under the premise (and likely binding law/treaty) of retaining some sovereignty. Each state has it's own laws, courts, police, military, etc. It's a feature, not a bug, that rural states can prevent the cities from imposing a tyranny of the majority on them at a federal level via the senate. Just as the house of representatives based on population can prevent a bunch of rural states from imposing their will on the high population ones.

Take for instance Nevada. If the majority of the population of Nevada wants legal gambling, they should be able to have it. A pure federal democracy would allow 9 states to make a law banning gambling nation wide. That's far less likely to happen in the current system as low population states have reason to band together and prevent any federal over riding of the freedom of their state's citizens to self govern.

Re: CIA agents who tortured are vulnerable to prosecution in any country

#127

Post by TheCoelacanth »

jmccree wrote: post #126
eli_gottlieb wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It would be entirely unfair if a small number of high population states could easily impose their will on a large number of small population states. Why? "States" are arbitrary lines drawn in the soil. Should everyone who wants more power just secede and form their own state, ad absurdum? Besides which, none of the actually existing countries with proportional-representation democracy have sent their rural regions t…

State borders are not any more arbitrary than the border between Canada and the US. In the US, "States" are sovereign states that gave up some limited amount of sovereignty to join the Union. They are not simply administrative divisions like in other countries. The Constitution established a limited role for the federal government of the United States and reserved all other powers to the individual states. It may see…

> In the US, "States" are sovereign states that gave up some limited amount of sovereignty to join the Union.

That's true of some of the states, such as the original 13 and Texas, but it's not true of most of them. Most states never had any form of sovereignty and were just arbitrarily created divisions of territory.

Re: CIA agents who tortured are vulnerable to prosecution in any country

#128

Post by justin66 »

TylerJay wrote: post #117
claudius wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I was just following orders" has already been established as an insufficient defense in the 1946 Nuremberg trials and essentially all later trials against WW 2 war criminals. It is by now pretty well established that crimes against humanity in general and torture in particular are not justifiable.

What about when it is combined with duress? Like if you refused once and were told they would kill your family if you ever refused again or quit? I'm just curious. I agree with the spirit of the idea that following orders is not valid justification, but being under duress is a well-known and generally accepted justification for committing a crime. Can you shed any extra light on this?

War criminals who would have been shot for abandoning their posts (almost all of the low-level guys fall into that category) have been, and continue to be, prosecuted for those crimes. It's not a hypothetical, it's still in the news.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/07/23/justice/nazi-charge-philadelph...

Re: CIA agents who tortured are vulnerable to prosecution in any country

#129

Post by justin66 »

bradleyjg wrote: post #113
justin66 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Prosecuting those who committed illegal acts, even though they were assured of immunity, sends a clear message that individuals are still responsible for their actions. They weren't really offered immunity, they were assured by the Office of Legal Counsel that they were doing something legal. Get bad advice from your lawyer as to what is legal and what isn't, go commit a crime, and see what happens.

> Get bad advice from your lawyer as to what is legal and what isn't, go commit a crime, and see what happens. I should start out by saying that I hope the torturers, their superiors, and enablers are prosecuted by anyone that can get their hands on them: a future US administration, the ICC, a European nation, anyone. That said the US legal analysis is very tough. The lawyers they were given "bad" advice by weren't j…

Good point about the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 and Military Commissions Act of 2006. I'm not so sure about the good faith reliance on advice of counsel thing, however, for the obvious reasons. The torturers and the OLC are part of the same chain of command...

As a practical matter I don't currently see the political will for prosecutions. If the public demanded it, maybe, but frankly I think a lot of the public feels complicit, in many cases unapologetically so. That all makes me very sad and I do hope these people start slipping up and travelling overseas...

Re: CIA agents who tortured are vulnerable to prosecution in any country

#130

Post by eli_gottlieb »

jmccree wrote: post #126
eli_gottlieb wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It would be entirely unfair if a small number of high population states could easily impose their will on a large number of small population states. Why? "States" are arbitrary lines drawn in the soil. Should everyone who wants more power just secede and form their own state, ad absurdum? Besides which, none of the actually existing countries with proportional-representation democracy have sent their rural regions t…

State borders are not any more arbitrary than the border between Canada and the US. In the US, "States" are sovereign states that gave up some limited amount of sovereignty to join the Union. They are not simply administrative divisions like in other countries. The Constitution established a limited role for the federal government of the United States and reserved all other powers to the individual states. It may see…

>Just as the house of representatives based on population can prevent a bunch of rural states from imposing their will on the high population ones.

Which it completely fails to do.

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