
The White House Has Been Covering Up the Presidency’s Role in Torture for Years - line-zero
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/03/13/president-obama-covering-presidencys-role-torture-4-years/
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spodek
It's like watching Lance Armstrong just before his fall. You know where it's
going to go and just wish they'd come clean and quit breaking the Constitution
instead of insisting on their innocence.

Too many scandals that went similarly ended up revealing cover-ups to expect
the Executive Branch to come out clean. It looks like it's trying to make the
most of a bad situation. Tylenol's 1982 recall remains the gold standard for
disaster recovery -- [http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/23/your-money/23iht-
mjj_ed3_....](http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/23/your-money/23iht-
mjj_ed3_.html). Doing something like that could salvage something and get
people on the White House's side.

But it only works if you act with sincerity.

~~~
rhizome
And like Lance Armstrong, they'll hold out until the bitter end. In a sense,
the only thing that can be done to shorten that rope is to publish more
information, either by leaks or otherwise. I'd love to see an ad campaign
(billboards in DC, Virginia and Maryland, for instance) imploring government
and intelligence workers to leak.

~~~
Crito
> _" I'd love to see an ad campaign (billboards in DC, Virginia and Maryland,
> for instance) imploring government and intelligence workers to leak."_

Would that possibly run afoul of "inciting imminent lawless action"? I would
also love to see such an advertising campaign, but I suspect you would get
some pretty fierce and heavy-hitting push-back on it.

~~~
jrockway
> fierce and heavy-hitting push-back

You mean, the media would start running your ads for free?

~~~
Crito
Great point, the Streisand Effect would definitely be working for you.

Here is a somewhat related ad campaign, encouraging people with jury duty to
refuse to convict people for crimes without victims:
[http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/metro-billboard-
ad...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/metro-billboard-advocating-
jury-nullification-concerns-local-
prosecutors/2013/10/29/fe53edbc-3da9-11e3-a94f-b58017bfee6c_story.html)

They tried to get this guy for jury tampering:
[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/20/nyregion/indictment-
agains...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/20/nyregion/indictment-against-
julian-heicklen-jury-nullification-advocate-is-dismissed.html)

Those campaigns managed to ruffle some feathers, and got lots of media
attention because of it. I imagine that this propose whistle-blower campaign
would raise even more.

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InclinedPlane
The bigger problem is societal acceptance of torture. There are countless
fictionalized portrayals of the "good guys" participating in torture and not
only remaining good but also getting benefit from it. That points to a deep
seated cultural acceptance of torture. And you see it in practice as well.
Many people believe that torture is acceptable if it's used towards important
ends (stopping terrorism).

Even if we put the brakes on the use of torture in an official capacity in the
here and now so long as it's culturally accepted to any degree it's only just
a matter of time until it creeps back to the forefront.

------
cdooh
Not too shocking. I'm sure this is too much of a generalisation but Anericans
don't like to know of the atrocities done in their name as long as their
"catching the bad guys". The global war on terror has you making enemies of
people who would otherwise leave you alone...

~~~
Crito
> _I 'm sure this is too much of a generalisation but Anericans don't like to
> know of the atrocities done in their name as long as their "catching the bad
> guys"_

I think it is worse than that. I think that they either don't care, or perhaps
even support it as long as it isn't too close to home for them. See the
treatment of torture on American television shows like _24_ or _Fringe_
(related discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7017222](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7017222)).

~~~
throwawayaway
Well I don't know, I doubt they care how close to home it is, provided they
still get paid. The purest cynicism I ever did see was in response to the
drone attacks on funerals. People cried "you're creating more terrorists". The
cynics replied, "That's actually the point". A self perpetuating war machine.
There are people out there that have this as their goal.

~~~
a3n
No corporation gets to count "peace" on their balance sheet, but man those
bullets pile up on the bottom line.

------
TrainedMonkey
Bush authorized CIA to do 'whatever it takes'. CIA cited him on it in their
interrogation guidelines. Some of the documents were released with
authorization blacked out. Now white house trying to keep specific wording of
that authorization hidden. Rest is purely speculation.

~~~
nabla9
This is bipartisan issue. If Bush&Cheney administration goes down, so goes
Clinton&Gore. Either everyone protects everyone else, or all go down together.

The CIA was granted permission to use extraordinary rendition (torture
flights) in a presidential directive signed by Bill Clinton in 1995. The
practize was started by George H. W. Bush in 1993.

~~~
griffinmahon
Inserting "bipartisan" into the conversation is moot. This issue -- torture --
is one of authority and the moral beliefs of society.

~~~
privong
i believe GP mentioned bipartisanship to point out that its unlikely either a
D or R administration would actively try to rectify the situation because
there's no political gain and there's likely political loss.

~~~
griffinmahon
Ah, I see. In that case, bipartisanship here is still moot.[1]

1\. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-
antonym](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-antonym)

~~~
privong
it's not obvious that "bipartisan" and "nonpartisan" are always auto-antonyms.
it may often be the case in practice, but there are are other parties for
voters to choose from. for that reason, it's not a universal anto-antonym like
say, flammable / inflammable.

~~~
griffinmahon
To clarify, I was commenting on the fact that introducing the notion of
bipartisanship to the discussion was moot (unworthy of talk) in the sense that
issues like this should transcend Left/Right ideology and moot (worthy of
talk) in that it's an interesting phenomenon to me that someone immediately
commented on parties, as though the American system has very deeply ingrained
this sense of parties that there is no alternative to.

Your point about the words though is even more intriguing (I love words!) and
I had actually never thought about the two together like that -- I don't often
see "nonpartisan" \-- to the extent that for a second I thought what you were
saying didn't make any sense.

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morsch
"These are not just academic exercises. We’re not analyzing the media on Mars
or in the 18th century or something like that. We’re dealing with real human
beings who are suffering and dying and being tortured and starving because of
policies that we are involved in. We, as citizens of democratic societies, are
directly involved in and are responsible for." (Eminent MIT political
activist)

------
ballard
The patterns of drone strikes and raids points to JSOC as processing an ever-
growing kill list directed by the POTUS. Feel free to peruse Dirty Wars docu.

~~~
tokenizer
If you believe in karma then you know this doesn't bode well for future
Americans. I doubt the next few generations of Pakistani will like them.

That said there's so much room for improvement at this point. Eventually
people are going to start losing faith in these 20th century institutions and
ideas, and hopefully the Millennials and future generations will fix it.

Unfortunately for the baby boomers and gen x, history will look back on them
as morally bankrupt, hypocritical and selfish.

~~~
ballard
The psychological precept of projection on an institutional level effectively
inspiring terrorist behavior, to further continue what the institution was
doing. It's as diffuse and pointless as Vietnam.

------
nl
People are framing this as a coverup story.

It is that, of course.

But the _reason_ it has happened is because the executive branch of government
is fighting to preserve its power, even across party lines (ie, the Obama
Whitehouse is covering up things that happened in the Bush Whitehouse).

Coming from somewhere with a Westminster system of government I find that
dynamic quite interesting. Clearly in this case it is bad, but I do like the
way the US system isn't as bound along party lines as Westminster systems
usually are.

------
TOGoS
Next time we get an opportunity for a constitutional amendment, I suggest
mandatory death penalty for any official found to have condoned or covered up
the use of torture.

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rthomas6
Is "torture" here waterboarding only or something even worse? I'm not
condoning waterboarding, but it's already unofficially common knowledge. What
other "enhanced interrogation techniques" were used under approval?

~~~
Zigurd
Sleep deprivation, which was subsequently "overused." I put that in quotes
because "too much torture" implies accepting some torture.

------
puppetmaster3
I'm almost sure there is no way this will lead to blow back - no way this
comes back to us. /s

------
ballard
This might be a completely crazy thought:

Given technological enablement, why cant govt be more run as a StackOverflow
tempered by the elder wisdom of the Supreme Court? Rip the executive branch
out and make the president more of a city manager than the political emperor.
Absolute power corrupts...

~~~
Anechoic
You mean Direct Democracy? I suspect folks here would be even more unhappy
with policies under that regime.

~~~
maybehybrid
> folks here would be even more unhappy

Maybe. But we could have a constitutional direct democracy (to provent the
policies which would make us unhappy), in addition to having smaller
countries. In the UK, for example, making the counties into states like in the
USA, but with direct democracy and rather than having a centeralised
government for the whole country have a EU-like meeting as though they were
seperate countries. It's a merky idea, but that's what I'm currently in favor
for. We should be able to call a referendum to get rid of certain laws but
maybe the government should continue to create the laws as means of reducing
idiocracy (like in Switzerland, but even that has dumb laws being passed
sometimes, but it by far has more personal freedom than in UK/USA in my
opinion).

I hope that makes sense, I'm not good with english.

~~~
ballard
We need more apolitical city managers getting things done and fewer Henry
VIII's playing figurehead and having mercurial power to chop heads on a whim
(ie JSOC).

