The Al-Qaeda Leader Who Wasn’t: The Shameful Ordeal of Abu Zubaydah

Post by hartpuff » Tue, Apr 26, 2016, 11:29 PM UTC

ikeboy wrote: post #169

hartpuff wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That word does not mean what you think it means. https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/presumption_of_innocence One of the most sacred principles in the American criminal justice system, holding that a defendant is *innocent* until proven guilty. > Plenty of uncharged and unconvicted people have broken the law. I can't believe anyone would bother making such a fatuous point, to which the obvious response is simply: plent…

>I can't believe anyone would bother making such a fatuous point, to which the obvious response is simply: plenty of uncharged and unconvicted (and even convicted for that matter) people have not broken the law. Which is entirely irrelevant. Your claim was that innocent simply meant not found guilty, which is incorrect. There's a "presumption" of innocence: "innocence" means they actually didn't do it, and the law as…

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Apr 26, 2016, 11:48 PM UTC

hartpuff wrote: post #171

ikeboy wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I can't believe anyone would bother making such a fatuous point, to which the obvious response is simply: plenty of uncharged and unconvicted (and even convicted for that matter) people have not broken the law. Which is entirely irrelevant. Your claim was that innocent simply meant not found guilty, which is incorrect. There's a "presumption" of innocence: "innocence" means they actually didn't do it, and the law as…

> Your claim was that innocent simply meant not found guilty, which is incorrect. What I said is: "by definition, the people being tortured, not having been found guilty of any crime, are innocent". Which is not incorrect. I'm going to assume you know the principle of innocent until proven guilty , since it was in my last reply, quoted from Cornell's Law site. > the law assumes they're in that state until proven othe…

Post by jmnicolas » Wed, Apr 27, 2016, 9:10 AM UTC

rhino369 wrote: post #167

jmnicolas wrote: post #21

This article will not change anything. By the time our day end we will have been bombarded by so much other information that it will just be one more forgotten thing. And there's so much things that are revolting that our brains are just shutting down as a self defense mechanism. Sociopaths in power don't even need to hide anymore, they know they are hidden in the noise. I mean look at Turkey : they help ISIS, they s…

One reason this won't cause a blip in the news is because it's really sensationalist and biased. The article implies that the government was totally wrong about Abu Zubaydah and, therefore, he was totally innocent But to prove that the article cites to the court memo that says the US government doesn't alleged Zubaydah was a member of al Qaeda. But the government still alleged he ran an independent terrorist training…

Post by zyxley » Wed, Apr 27, 2016, 4:24 PM UTC

blowski wrote: post #149

zyxley wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of my point is that there will literally never be an end that justifies the means with torture, because torture factually does not and will never return any kind of reliable information. Trying to stress the point with weird hypotheticals just emphasizes that the weird hypotheticals don't reflect the facts of what results torture gives.

I imagine that if you torture 1000 of your enemies you will get at least some useful information from them. Sure, they will also give you a lot of rubbish and you'll struggle to know what's true and what's made up. But that 1% nugget of truth is what the Donald Trumps of this world use to justify torture. I imagine for the head of the CIA or Mossad or MI5, these aren't weird hypotheticals but real decisions. We need…

Post by eric_h » Thu, Apr 28, 2016, 8:13 PM UTC

Strom wrote: post #178

eric_h wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that the design of the nation's site is better/more modern. However, when I landed on the site, I was able to read the first sentence before a modal subscription form popped up. I clicked the little x button in the top right of that modal, and it did a full page load redirecting me to an article about hillary clinton, and then popped the subscription modal again. I clicked the x button again and it did the sa…

That does sound like a bad experience indeed. I didn't get that myself, and can't seem to replicate it now in incognito either. Perhaps geo-targeting? Pop-ups suck, and I wish my browser's pop-up blocker would also block these inline e-mail asking dialogs in every site.