

The Guantánamo "Suicides": A Camp Delta sergeant blows the whistle - dantheman
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2010/01/hbc-90006368

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dantheman
Not Traditional HN Fare, but I think an extremely important article.

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amvp
Agreed. It may be Off Topic, but it's incredibly important to shine a light on
these things - unpleasant and uncomfortable as they may be. It's easy for us
to look at history and marvel at the inhumanity that we're capable of, but
Milgram's experiments (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment>)
showed that an individual's conscience is a reticent faculty, when isolated in
the face of authority. It's imperative that we talk openly, and agree as a
society what's allowed and what's simply unacceptable.

~~~
tungstenfurnace
It's better to steer clear of political issues which are covered more than
adequately elsewhere.

They are by their nature divisive and tend to make people upset and/or angry.
This coarsens the atmosphere and makes reasoned and intelligent discussion far
less feasible.

~~~
rbanffy
I can be upset and angry and still participate in a rational discussion. What
will we do when an issue is both important and divisive? Will we avoid it
because it's divisive and may upset people? Is not being upset more important
than the free exchange of ideas?

This is Hacker News. Maybe I am projecting something here, but I thought of us
as explorers of ideas. Do we want to prevent, to silence, discussion?

~~~
tungstenfurnace
>I can be upset and angry and still participate in a rational discussion.

The problem is that it would only take a few people who _can't_ remain
rational for a tipping point to be reached whereby the overall quality of
debate badly degrades. (That's when some of the most valuable contributors
start to disappear.)

>What will we do when an issue is both important and divisive

If such a political issue affected hackers directly then there'd be no way to
avoid that discussion.

>Do we want to prevent, to silence, discussion?

Of course not. And that's precisely why politics in general should be avoided.

Aside from the eve psych, I'm with Eliezer Yudkowsky on this:

<http://lesswrong.com/lw/gw/politics_is_the_mindkiller/>

~~~
rbanffy
"a few people who couldn't manage that"

That's what downvotes are for. That's why we should refrain from downvoting
for disagreement and keeping it for shorting out comments that are damaging to
the discussion.

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pmorici
Google maps has some good photos, you can even see the white van mentioned in
the story in the woods.

[http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&...](http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=Guantanamo+bay&sll=37.926868,-95.712891&sspn=48.606034,54.580078&ie=UTF8&hq=Guantanamo+bay&hnear=Guant%C3%A1namo+Bay&ll=19.906799,-75.110435&spn=0.003586,0.003331&t=h&z=18)

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tptacek
Flagged. An important article for another site.

~~~
amvp
I disagree. Some things transcend that distinction and should be discussed in
every community - they affect every human. And this is coming from somebody
who isn't thrilled HN isn't as hard edged tech/startup-culture focused as it
once was. On the front page right now I see: 'When work doesn't pay for the
middle class' 'FBI broke law for years in phone record searches' 'Professor Is
a Label That Leans to the Left' Flag those and I'll upvote you. But I'd like
this one to get as many eyeballs as possible.

~~~
tptacek
The mistake you're making here is thinking about it as a value judgement about
the article. It's not. The article is solid. I read it. I've been following
the story.

It simply has _nothing to do_ with what Hacker News is about, and sticking it
here to maximize the number of eyeballs it gets is an abuse of the site.

Here's some help, if the guidelines seem fuzzy:

<http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

There is nothing about this story that gratifies anyone's intellectual
curiosity. Those of us who are inclined to believe stories reported in Harpers
(myself included) already know about the torture problem. It isn't evidence of
a new trend.

The rest of you reading this would be doing the site a favor if, instead of
voting me up, you simply hit the "flag" button on the story.

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trevelyan
Chinese censorship policy is considered fair game but American censorship
policy isn't? Strange perspective.

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nailer
This isn't censorship. You're welcome to submit the article to any site you
want. I think it's a good article, and deserves to be read.

But this is forum for discussing technology, startups, and hacker-relevant
topics.

Edit: if the article itself contains something about technology, it's clearly
not the main subject, which is prisoner abuse.

~~~
rbanffy
I find this disintegration of moral standards a very hacker-worthy issue.
Hackers have been on the forefront of the defense of civil rights in a moment
when technology advances much faster than the law can react to it or society
can absorb it.

A guy was arrested a couple days back because he jokingly vented his
frustration on Twitter. Another had his face stamped on a most wanted
criminals list seen around the planet because a technician found using his
face would save him some work. We understand this changing technologies better
than most. We can help.

~~~
tptacek
Eric Raymond finds gun control to be a very hacker-worthy issue, and firmly
believes that true hackers are all libertarians. Many people clearly believe
that atheism is a hacker-worthy issue, because creationists are disrupting
science classes. Where does it end? Nowhere. It never ends. You let one of
these stories through, you let them all through, and bang, we're Reddit.

~~~
trevelyan
I see that this article is off the front page despite having around sixty up-
votes. It has been replaced by an essay informing us that Bill Gates is on
Twitter. I didn't submit this article, but I'm posting this in case you
personally catch it tptacek, because I'm disappointed you've succeeded in
shutting down discussion. And I'm also disappointed that a third of all
comments made on this thread to date are by you and are focused on preempting
discussion and accusing others of being off-topic. In most online environments
that would count as trollish behavior.

Downvoting and flagging is one thing and I think you're certainly in your
rights to use those tools to sculpt the sorts of discussions you want to take
place here. Coopting interesting and informative threads by launching trollish
attacks on the relevance of the material is another. Most of the replies to
your post were perfectly civil.

As someone who is personally running a startup outside of the United States, I
find that US policy on the War on Terror has a much stronger effect on my
business (particularly through regulations affecting international money
transfers, credit card processing and air travel) than a host of other issues
including things like start-up visas or security vulnerabilities and other
subjects you presumably consider much more on-topic given your own business.
Articles that touch on these topics are on-topic to me.

So even disregarding the most interesting and relevant thing about this
article - the fact that military censorship of communications technologies and
then FOIA blackouts apparently kept this story away from the popular media for
four years - it is not irrelevant as a policy issue for a lot of people who
are not you. In the future, if you want to shut down a discussion by all means
flag it, but don't ruin the discussion space for those who are actually
curious what others think.

~~~
tptacek
The military has censored communications since time immemorial.

I've been a factor in a lot of discussion on Hacker News that I haven't
managed to "shut down".

What's shutting down this "discussion" is that there isn't anything to discuss
productively.

We could continue trying to provoke a fruitless discussion by extrapolating
further and further from the story; "the US is evil", etc. That might pick a
pointless fight.

Thankfully, I think Hacker News is largely innoculated from discussions like
that.

The fact of the matter is that this isn't an article about how the War On
Terror affects startups, and it isn't an article about censorship. If you want
to have a discussion about those topics, write a blog post.

It will be relevant to Hacker News, and I will vote it up.

