60 ms·

CIA black site detainee served as training prop to teach torture techniques

534 points by LittleMoveBig 5y ago

foxyv 5y ago
I kind of hoped that Biden would try and stop this thing from happening anymore. Or Obama... Then I see stuff like this: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/oct/06/cia-torture-secret-biden-administration-guantanamo-bay-supreme-court https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/oct/06/cia-torture-...
- bogantech 5y ago
  No president is going to do anything about it because the intelligence agencies almost certainly have blackmail material on them all
  - mbg721 5y ago
    Blackmail is for mid-level aspiring politicians who get bigger than their britches. A presidential candidate is a smiling face that carries the decision-makers' platform.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - whatshisface 5y ago
    A president was recently elected that had more viable blackmail material released about him than any previous president and instead of launching missiles into Sudan like Clinton did a couple days after his scandal, he just slid past it.
    - ejstronge 5y ago
      > A president was recently elected that had more viable blackmail material released about him than any previous president and instead of launching missiles into Sudan like Clinton did a couple days after his scandal, he just slid past it. I'm not sure how a scandal during one presidency is comparable in your example to scandals that happened before a presidency. Further, you might recall that there was a 'strategic strike' attack in Africa as well as a contentious immigration ban in the first weeks of the Trump presidency, which, if I am following your logic, would actually suggest an attempt to distract from unsavory past deeds.
      - whatshisface 5y ago
        The Sudan+Afghanistan thing was two days after the scandal broke. I am curious if there were any similar actions by any of the following presidents but launching stuff right after entering office doesn't appear to be the same kind of action. (Perhaps there is another cynical explanation for the Africa thing but it is probably not to distract from an, as you say, decades-old scandal.)
    - dhosek 5y ago
      One of my friends from college is now a Poli Sci professor. He researched the effectiveness of “wag the dog” techniques and found that they were ineffective. I don't think his paper on the topic is available online though.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    - tehwebguy 5y ago
      Indeed, the last 4 years presented a very unique (maybe even a once-in-a-country’s-lifetime) opportunity. It’s a shame he squandered it.
  - foxyv 5y ago
    I think that the CIA carries a lot of value for sitting presidents. The organization gives them a lot of power, similar to the military but with less accountability. So far we haven't seen a president that was willing to give up that power for any reason of simple morality. There is something appealing about being able to send an organization out to kill, steal, and spy for you with zero accountability. I don't think the CIA would need to or even be able to blackmail a sitting president. They are too busy being his second most powerful tool. Like a really good hunting dog. It doesn't matter if it bites some peasants so long as he does a good job for its master.
    - codr7 5y ago
      We most certainly did see a president who was willing to give up that power to destroy the CIA, and they killed him in public to make sure everyone got the message.
  - jonnybgood 5y ago
    How does that work exactly? CIA: If you don’t let us torture people just because then we’ll make a scandal of you. President: Oh no. I guess I have to let you. I have no power whatsoever. Can’t get the FBI on it, because they’re blackmailing me too! The US government and intelligence agencies is not like what you see in the movies.
    - dls2016 5y ago
      > How does that work exactly? Jeffrey Epstein. Do you think it was coincidence that he had power of attorney over Les Wexner, who was involved with the notorious Southern Air Transport? There are many other intelligence connections, for instance Maxwell and her father. The CIA is really the worst institution in the US government.
      - Gollapalli 5y ago
        You speak as though Epstein and Maxwell were _American_ intelligence.
        dls2016 5y ago
        Obviously, the (mountains of) circumstantial evidence suggests some sort of intelligence connection, with Maxwell's father having known ties to MI6, Mossad and even the KGB. But I don't think you'd be able to run around bribing billionaires like Leon Black under the guise of "tax advice" without the US authorities' involvement. Also, Southern Air Transport was a CIA front company.
    - michaelt 5y ago
      Presumably bogantech is thinking of the likes of J. Edgar Hoover - who had his federal agency spy on political leaders, and "amassed a great deal of power and was in a position to intimidate and threaten others, including multiple sitting presidents of the United States." according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Edgar_Hoover https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Edgar_Hoover
  - joncp 5y ago
    More like: "Hey boss, remember JFK? It would be a real shame if something like that happened to you. Or your family."
    - foxyv 5y ago
      How long do you think the CIA would remain as a legitimate organization if something like that happened? All it would take is one public statement by a president that CIA had threatened them and the organization would come down like a house of cards. The entire leadership would be in handcuffs and trying to explain away treason to the FBI who would happily hand them over to military intelligence organizations to rendition their asses to their own prisons. There are tons of competing military intelligence organizations that would be happy to take over from there. The CIA as we know it would cease to exist in a matter of days.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - worik 5y ago
        > How long do you think the CIA would remain as a legitimate organization if something like that happened? It has been about seventy years so far.
      - tehwebguy 5y ago
        You are saying this in a thread for an article about how the CIA uses human beings as torture testers, where do you think the line is for them? lmao
    - mhh__ 5y ago
      Given that most presidents have huge egos that is a huge gamble for the CIA. All it takes is one tape to get out and then you've just started a civil war.
- millzlane 5y ago
  Well considering the Biden administration, like the Trump administration before it, said the information should not be disclosed because it would do significant harm to national security. The mention of national security makes me think the issue here is multi faceted.
  - wl 5y ago
    The case the Supreme Court used to uphold the State Secrets privilege was, in retrospect, a coverup with no genuine national security issues. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Reynolds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Reynolds
  - whatshisface 5y ago
    National security is not a get-out-of-democracy-free card. There has to be some way for public opinions about the CIA to loop back around to the congresspeople on the security council, otherwise the system won't work.
  - mc32 5y ago
    The likely possibilities are, they all agree it’s necessary for reasons we don’t understand so they condone it—or, the power of the executive branch is diffuse and doesn’t always emanate from the Oval Office. I.e., the so called deep state, career bureaucracy and momentum hold more sway.
  - bannedbybros 5y ago
- pessimizer 5y ago
  They were good at stopping us from prosecuting it, or the destruction of the evidence of it.
- NoGravitas 5y ago
  Obama ran for office on a pledge to close Guantanamo, and he could have done so by executive order. He didn't, and that should tell you all you need to know about the nature of the American presidency.
  - dhosek 5y ago
    There was a HUGE faction in congress (they go by a name that rhymes with schmepublicans) that would have punished him severely if he had done that. The presidency is not as all-powerful as some people think it is, sometimes this is good, sometimes not so much.
    - pmoriarty 5y ago
      Punished him severely how? Trump did way more extreme things with impunity.
    - thissuchness 5y ago
      Punished him how? Were the schmepublicans not already turning up the drama dial to 11? What further recourse did they have to make things worse for him?
    - bell-cot 5y ago
      Early in a new President's first term, "I promised over and over to do X while I was running for President, and the American People very clearly voted for that" is d*mn good political cover for doing X.
      - tehwebguy 5y ago
        Not to mention, who cares? Do the thing or don’t be president.
    - nradov 5y ago
      When President Obama took office, Democrats controlled both the House and Senate. You can't hang this one on Republicans. Both parties were equal participants in keeping the Guantanamo detention facility open. Congress sets the annual federal budget. The Democrat controlled Congress literally allocated dollars to run that facility. If Democrats actually wanted to close it they could have eliminated funding, but they specifically chose to keep it multiple times.
- elzbardico 5y ago
  They are all part of the same system, a system which has only the trappings of a democracy, but in no practical sense is the government from the people, by the people to the people. It is just a giant gang warfare between warring plutocratic and bureaucratic factions. Trump, Biden, Bush, Obama. They all tortured, they all bombed, they all let people die without healthcare while spending billions in the biggest military machine of the world, for "defense". It is about time people wake up and stop letting those criminals divide us in their fictional turfs.
- worik 5y ago
  Obama was very bad. Made the use of robots to do extra judicial killings, state sanctioned murder, routine. What a shame.
mrtksn 5y ago
This is the kind of stuff that probably makes some people’s job down the pipe easier and at the same time undermines the Western civilization. Make no mistake, no US citizen outside of the political class benefits from this or other atrocities. The exact same goes for the surveillance programs. Losing the moral high ground degrades the whole society. The whole anti establishment movement rallies around stuff like this. The lefties and the right-wingers will be after different things but they will be able to come together on the hypocritical stance and corruption of the current system. It unites enemies against you who think that the most important thing is to bring down the current horrible governance and figure out things later.
- adamsmith143 5y ago
  Is it possible for you to construct a scenario where torture is morally acceptable? E.g. you have a virtual certainty that a dirty bomb is going to be detonated in NYC and will kill 1M+ and potentially irradiate the city for decades. Is torturing one person who you know with certainty knows the location of the bomb defensible? Basically, how many lives would you be willing to sacrifice to prevent the suffering of a single person?
  - defen 5y ago
    Do we have any evidence that torture actually works? That the person being tortured will tell accurate information? Basically do we have any examples of this sort of situation, where there was an imminent threat to life and people were saved due to torture?
    - throwawaymanbot 5y ago
    - adamsmith143 5y ago
      >Basically do we have any examples of this sort of situation, where there was an imminent threat to life and people were saved due to torture? In the made up scenario you could make a case that even if there is a low probability of torture working, the scale of lives saved would make it worth it. A 20% chance of saving 1M people is still net +200k lives.
dingoegret12 5y ago
Christ this is beyond horrendous.
jMyles 5y ago
Holy shit. This is nauseating. Why do we tolerate the existence of the US state anymore? What's the point of any of this? I _hate_ the feeling of the smacking the back of my head. And they did it, against a plywood wall, by gripping a towel wrapped around his neck and slamming him into it, for two hours at a time, just to 'train' people. Everyone involved - perpetrators and victims - needs therapy and rehabilitation. The assailants need to sit down and apologize to this guy if they are ever going to be healthy humans again.
- codr7 5y ago
  Why? Fear, they know what they're doing.
- dash2 5y ago
  I think the perpetrators need to be tried, found guilty and put in jail. Then they can apologize if they want.
- l33t2328 5y ago
  > do we tolerate the existence of the US state anymore This is a ridiculous thing to say. I mean, what are you proposing? The whole world sanction the US?
  - worik 5y ago
    >> do we tolerate the existence of the US state anymore > This is a ridiculous thing to say. I mean, what are you proposing? The whole world sanction the US? That would be a good start
  - jMyles 5y ago
    I am proposing that the US state no longer exist. The use cases of a single government having domain over such a large land mass, when 50 smaller states are already defined and functioning, are dwindling amidst the information age. The crimes described in this article are utterly intolerable. Nobody wants this.
- worik 5y ago
catchclose8919 5y ago
...isn't the whole idea of such "back sites" that once anyone gets into them, they are NEVER getting out alive? Torture and atrocities asside, I'd imagine most organized crime syndicates run tighter ships (eg. the standard dissolve the bodies of torture victims + kill the "torture service providers" too at regular intervals then re-recruit new ones etc.) ...this seem so beyond sloppy it's clearly a political s throwing play.
- spacechild1 5y ago
  I thought the same. But maybe they just do (have) not care. History has shown that the US can do all sorts of horrendous things and nothing ever seems to happen...
  - pmoriarty 5y ago
    "History has shown that the US can do all sorts of horrendous things and nothing ever seems to happen..." Well, nothing except: 1 - make lots of enemies 2 - make the world a more dangerous place 3 - lose the moral high ground and the respect of people/countries who might have otherwise been friends These things have consequences... measured in American lives (which are, sadly, the only kind of lives some people care about)... but also in many other lives.
    - mandmandam 5y ago
      Up to 8 billion present human lives, trillions or qaudrillions of potential human lives, and uncountable animal and plant lives. That's not exaggeration. Those are the stakes America is fucking around with by provoking the world like this and spooking the shit out of everyone.
      - pmoriarty 5y ago
        It's not just America either... plenty of blame to go around. Power corrupts.
Sharlin 5y ago
> “Ammar fabricated the information he provided when undergoing EITs,” it said. “He later admitted to his interrogators/debriefers that he was terrified and lied to get agency officers to stop the measures … Ammar also explained that he was afraid to tell a lie and was afraid to tell the truth because he did not know how either would be received.” Which is pretty much all you need to know about torture.
- torturedreading 5y ago
  > Which is pretty much all you need to know about torture. When torture or "EIT" is used for a source of intelligence, using that sole point of data as proof is fraught with peril. Dropping JDAMs on a building fingered solely by a detainee is sure to get random bystanders killed. Running a raid, similarly, might well be a trap. However, when one corroborates this with other sources of data, it is a "valid" technique. When one uses a piece of intelligence from a detainee as a starting point and further validates the veracity of the claim, it is a "valid" starting point. This isn't to say whether or not this path counts as moral, just that the "torture doesn't work because lies" is itself dishonest.
  - pmoriarty 5y ago
    "Dropping JDAMs on a building fingered solely by a detainee is sure to get random bystanders killed." Like that ever stopped anyone. "Collateral damage" they call it.
  - shkkmo 5y ago
    My understanding is that rapport building techniques have a much better success rate.
    - e12e 5y ago
      Yeah, even nazi Germany realized that: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanns_Scharff https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanns_Scharff
  - hammock 5y ago
_Marak_ 5y ago
Ouch
chmod775 5y ago
Wow. Now that was hard to read. The people who can do these things need to be locked away for the good of mankind. Start from the top.
- typon 5y ago
  >Start from the top. Precisely. I think if the US wants to be a global hegemon without having a bankrupt/hypocritical liberal ideology, a good way to start would be with locking up Bush, Cheney, and the rest of the neocons responsible for the Iraq War for a life sentence. Obama, Clinton and the rest of the administration officials responsible for Libya, Syria, and the drone assassination program. We don't even need to go that far back to prosecute all living presidents (even though in a just world, we would), but this would be a good start. Anything less means that US participation in international institutions like ICJ is just a farce (like how Saudi Arabia has a seat on the UN HRC)
upofadown 5y ago
>The interrogators were convinced that Baluchi knew more than he was saying because he was a nephew of the self-proclaimed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, Khaled Sheikh Mohammed. Repressive regimes often make a point of persecuting family members. It sends the message that resistance will cause terrible things to happen to those you love, not just you. The torture works toward that end in this case.
- sneak 5y ago
  It almost makes one wonder if there is no such thing as a regime that isn't "repressive", given that the one most loudly trumpeting the rule of law and righteousness engages in the exact same blatantly criminal acts as all of the other ones they like to vilify as being without the rule of law. There are precisely zero states that have the power to torture with impunity that don't use it to, well, torture with impunity. It's a decades old running gag and common TV trope in the US-and-A that you'll get raped in prison if you get locked up. Everyone truly knows that the concept of equal protection under the law is just a joke, but we keep on as if the emperor were fully clothed. Now that we've got a real honest-to-goodness war (with associated war crimes) happening in the only region of this planet that seemed at present to have a snowball's chance in hell of actually maintaining peace and human rights, I'm beginning to wonder if large groups of humans are even capable of actually having, you know, a civilization. It's not lookin' good. I will remain pathologically optimistic, however.
xyst 5y ago
"Enhanced interrogation techniques" is one of the reasons why the US no longer recognizes the ICC jurisdiction.
- sschueller 5y ago
  It never did. The Bush admin even passed a bill to pull anyone sent to it out by force in necessary. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Protection_Act https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_...
- ganzuul 5y ago
  And why the world no longer recognized the US jurisdiction on anything. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
- worik 5y ago
  Their routine use of torture is one of the reasons why the US no longer recognizes the ICC jurisdiction. Can we not use the euphemisms?
c7DJTLrn 5y ago
Disgusting. May the people who participated go to the same level of hell as the 9/11 perpetrators.
- fractalfinity 5y ago
Tepix 5y ago
Reading this makes me sick and doubt humanity. The ongoing Assange case comes to mind. A farce if i've ever seen one.
- 2xpress 5y ago
  And isn't it ironic that a US citizen is currently laying low in Putin's Moscow, of all places, because he does not expect a fair or humane treatment from the US judicial system over his alleged "crimes".
tored 5y ago
EU should put sanctions on top US leadership and many of the large US based corporations, especially in businesses like banking, media and technology.
- Extropy_ 5y ago
  What do you think that will accomplish?
  - tored 5y ago
    Short term: keep US responsible for their actions, otherwise this will just continue. Long term: a broader separation of US and EU interest, EU does not benefit from many of the US imperial policies, it actually loses on many of them.
- etotolkoya 5y ago
  oh, you think that EU is independent :) how old are you?
  - tored 5y ago
    As I explained in my response I want EU to become more independent from US https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30688930 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30688930
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
pandemicsoul 5y ago
Bonkers reading through this thread and seeing people discuss torture as casually and unemotionally as if it were just a regular ol' anyday thing. Like wow folks, this is not academic!
- gerbilly 5y ago
  That's HN for you. I honestly don't know why I keep coming here. This is a safe space for rationalisation, we can't let 'the feels' creep in and threaten that. Also it would be way too 'political' if we assigned a moral valence to torture, and political discussions are discouraged here.
  - worik 5y ago
    Weighing torture, in light of "if it is effective it is OK" is not "rationalisation". It is loosing the civilisation plot.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - cheeze 5y ago
    But it's totally okay to get political about COVID and deny, deny, deny here. Such an odd cross section of libertarian "freedom above all else" people and legitimately smart technical folks. I like the technical part, the "this is binary and I believe in freedom above all else" cohort turns me off pretty hard though.
    - gerbilly 5y ago
      > "this is binary and I believe in freedom above all else" cohort turns me off pretty hard though. Randroids probably. Ayn Rand is piss poor literature, and even worse as philosophy or life advice.
    - dc-programmer 5y ago
      Anything short of libertarian anarchy is a dystopia to these folks. You would actually think that people with a “rationalist” bias would care more about outcomes than elevating deontological ideals above all else but I guess not
cwkoss 5y ago
If our country was just, everyone in the CIA who engaged in or authorized torture would be executed. I'm typically against capital punishment, but state sanctioned torture is such a far line past what is acceptable, I really think we'd be better off if we swept all these evil people off the face of the planet. Instead, they get cushy think tank and consultancy jobs as a reward for their evil 'service'.
- runeks 5y ago
  > […] I really think we'd be better off if we swept all these evil people off the face of the planet. That’s exactly what your alleged enemy thinks.
- sneak 5y ago
  The right not to be tortured and the right to not be murdered (by the state or anyone else) are practically uttered in the same breath. You can't fix violence with more violence, you have to fix violence with cleverness.
  - cwkoss 5y ago
    What is the clever path to fixing an unaccountable branch of government who keeps secrets from the people meant to oversee it to cover up their egregious acts? They are effectively a rogue criminal organization with the power of state protection at this point. Making an example of the criminal acts we do have knowledge of seems the only effective recourse short of dismantling the CIA entirely.
    - sneak 5y ago
      I think that literally the only way to dismantle the CIA and other blatantly and obviously criminal portions of the US government without using violence is to spread wide the fact that they are a portion of the government that operates entirely outside of the rule of law, and that we can't be said to actually have the rule of law/democracy/freedom/etc if it doesn't apply equally to everyone. If enough people shout about the emperor's nakedness enough times, eventually it will jump the gap from something everyone knows, to common knowledge[1] (something everyone knows that everyone knows). They will have to fall into disrepute, and that won't happen by us being quiet about it. Right now, I think most people in the US think of the US as a place with the rule of law, and equal application thereof. The CIA's well-documented activities illustrate plainly that that is not true. The well-publicized summary executions of unarmed people by the police without trial or jury are getting noticed more often, as well. We can say it in plain words, often, to bring it to the level of common sense. The vast, vast majority of people would like to live in a place with the rule of law, applied fairly and equally to all people. An even higher percentage would be on board without the rule of law, just so long as no special connected elites get unique treatment and free taxpayer money. This is a big tent. There will, of course, be a subset of the population at all times that wants gun-toting, black-bag Jack Bauer 007 "license to kill" daddy to run around and exercise their best super reliable adult judgement and eschew the entire time-consuming nonsense of arrest and human rights and trial and just put a blowtorch to the balls of the Completely Obviously Guilty Bad Terrorist Guy immediately, as we have immortalized in so much of our entertainment. But I remain resolute in my belief that those people are a small minority of human beings, and are shrinking every generation. There isn't a month of my life that goes by that I am not beaming proud of the human race that we even gave the fucking nazis full on courtroom trials after WW2. If that doesn't show that we can absolutely get there on a long enough timescale, I don't know what does. The usual tropes apply: - sunlight is the best disinfectant - teach, listen, learn - treat others as you wish to be treated - always stand up for the truth We've been improving for thousands of years. In another few we'll get there yet. [1]: https://www.epsilontheory.com/inflation-and-the-common-knowledge-game/ https://www.epsilontheory.com/inflation-and-the-common-knowl... https://www.epsilontheory.com/sheep-logic/ https://www.epsilontheory.com/sheep-logic/
CrzyLngPwd 5y ago
ugh, that was hard to read.
rl3 5y ago
A neuropsychologist carried out an MRI of Baluchi’s head in late 2018 and found “abnormalities indicating moderate to severe brain damage” in parts of his brain, affecting memory formation and retrieval as well as behavioral regulation. The specialist found that the “abnormalities observed were consistent with traumatic brain injury.” Awful. I kind of wonder if this ignorance extends to training their own field agents at The Farm where they do mock torture. Unlike Hollywood, taking a few blows to the head tends to be deleterious rather than toughening one up. Potentially even disabling or fatal.
vmception 5y ago
Reads like cause for a special military operation against the people that allow this
sneak 5y ago
The CIA has a venture capital arm, called In-Q-Tel, which invests in tech companies. Many of you reading this have coworkers who share a cap table with this organization. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30628667 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30628667 Those of you who work at Amazon, your employer built and operates a special custom, airgapped datacenter at Langley for this organization. When you write library code that makes AWS services better, you also enrich this organization and make them more effective at carrying out these types of operations (like actively hacking into the computers in the US Congress that were used by the congresspeople who provide oversight to the CIA, to delete evidence of torture, getting caught doing the hacking and evidence tampering, and subsequently lying to Congress about the hacking). https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/the-details-about-the-cias-deal-with-amazon/374632/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/the-d...
anon_2022 5y ago
Making the post as anon. I fully support the CIA to use torture even on US Citizens. If you're caught planning a terror attack or something similar that could cause mass loss of life, torture is a reasonable last resort to extract information from a suspect
- tehwebguy 5y ago
  The shame you feel for your opinion is a good start
- dqpb 5y ago
  Let’s say you confiscate a computer. What do you gain by bashing it against a wall?
- CyanBird 5y ago
  Sure, but this guy wasn't caught planning anything, he was just a rando family member and as the article mentions the cia itself already assessed that was the case, that he wasn't a danger Yet they decided to use him as a training dummy anyway, why? Because the cia is just fucking evil and it ought have been disbanded in the 1960s with JFK Anyhow, what I just wish is that more world powers had their own CIAs and dedicated themselves to hunt down and kill US cia agents as needed to defend their national sovereignty and population The US doesn't understand anything but violence, I just wish there were more tools to deter the US from using it, forcing it to a dialogue table, terrorist country.
dqpb 5y ago
CIA employees who engaged in this behavior should be treated as terrorists who sought to undermine the legitimacy of the US government.
gambler 5y ago
I am sure after learning this all Americans will take to the streets and after a massive protest the government will defund CIA and prosecute everyone responsible for the related crimes. Right? And if that doesn't happen, European companies will cancel American accounts, IKEA will close shop here, GOG will refuse to sell games in US, etc, etc. Right? Because, as I've learned on HN in the last two weeks, all citizens are responsible for what their government is doing, regardless of their knowledge or level of support for the practice.
- egisspegis 5y ago
  I'm sure they will when US starts carpet bombing Canada's cities.
  - apocolyps6 5y ago
    So the Middle East and South America is okay but Canada is off limits?
    - CyanBird 5y ago
      I mean, of course You don't ever see anything about the invasions of Grenada or Panama, let alone all the murk that the US does with Haiti, heck Puerto Rico is not even a state but a US Caribbean colony, the US used to torture the separatists leaders of Puerto Rico with Radiation https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/50-years-since-Death-of-Puerto-Rican-Leader-Tortured-By-US-20150421-0036.html https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/50-years-since-Death-of-... I am posting telesur purposely btw, if anyone else cares go read the wiki
- PoignardAzur 5y ago
  > Because, as I've learned on HN in the last two weeks, all citizens are responsible for what their government is doing, Yup. They absolutely are. There is no way the US's long history of human right abuses would have gone on for so long if the american people weren't fundamentally okay with it. Doesn't mean anything will be done about it.
jakobdabo 5y ago
Those students must have been real proud that they passed the exam with high marks. Now I wonder what type of exams are designed for the drone operators.
- 2xpress 5y ago
  https://old.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/86sc4h/three_students_at_the_cia_academy_were_about_to/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/86sc4h/three_student...
theknocker 5y ago
Gollapalli 5y ago
I think it’s worth noting that the United States has not won a war since the CIA was formed. They seem a useless liability that gives us a bad name. Perhaps we should move intelligence work back under the domain of the military, how it was before 1941. We could put the marines in charge of the CIA’s mission, that mission being expeditionary intelligence (and not torturing people on black sites).
rramadass 5y ago
From Orwell's "Notes on Nationalism" Indifference to Reality - All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. ... Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage – torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians – which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side.
2xpress 5y ago
How come the article is not naming who was doing the torturing, and does not mention anynothing regarding attempting to contact the office of the US Attorney General to ask why no criminal charges have been filed?
afroboy 5y ago
This type of subjects always feed the hate against USA, it's matter of time till they get the next 9/11.
throwawaymanbot 5y ago

534 points by LittleMoveBig 5y ago

I kind of hoped that Biden would try and stop this thing from happening anymore. Or Obama... Then I see stuff like this: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/oct/06/cia-torture-secret-biden-administration-guantanamo-bay-supreme-court https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/oct/06/cia-torture-...

bogantech 5y ago
No president is going to do anything about it because the intelligence agencies almost certainly have blackmail material on them all
- mbg721 5y ago
  Blackmail is for mid-level aspiring politicians who get bigger than their britches. A presidential candidate is a smiling face that carries the decision-makers' platform.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- whatshisface 5y ago
  A president was recently elected that had more viable blackmail material released about him than any previous president and instead of launching missiles into Sudan like Clinton did a couple days after his scandal, he just slid past it.
  - ejstronge 5y ago
    > A president was recently elected that had more viable blackmail material released about him than any previous president and instead of launching missiles into Sudan like Clinton did a couple days after his scandal, he just slid past it. I'm not sure how a scandal during one presidency is comparable in your example to scandals that happened before a presidency. Further, you might recall that there was a 'strategic strike' attack in Africa as well as a contentious immigration ban in the first weeks of the Trump presidency, which, if I am following your logic, would actually suggest an attempt to distract from unsavory past deeds.
    - whatshisface 5y ago
      The Sudan+Afghanistan thing was two days after the scandal broke. I am curious if there were any similar actions by any of the following presidents but launching stuff right after entering office doesn't appear to be the same kind of action. (Perhaps there is another cynical explanation for the Africa thing but it is probably not to distract from an, as you say, decades-old scandal.)
  - dhosek 5y ago
    One of my friends from college is now a Poli Sci professor. He researched the effectiveness of “wag the dog” techniques and found that they were ineffective. I don't think his paper on the topic is available online though.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - tehwebguy 5y ago
    Indeed, the last 4 years presented a very unique (maybe even a once-in-a-country’s-lifetime) opportunity. It’s a shame he squandered it.
- foxyv 5y ago
  I think that the CIA carries a lot of value for sitting presidents. The organization gives them a lot of power, similar to the military but with less accountability. So far we haven't seen a president that was willing to give up that power for any reason of simple morality. There is something appealing about being able to send an organization out to kill, steal, and spy for you with zero accountability. I don't think the CIA would need to or even be able to blackmail a sitting president. They are too busy being his second most powerful tool. Like a really good hunting dog. It doesn't matter if it bites some peasants so long as he does a good job for its master.
  - codr7 5y ago
    We most certainly did see a president who was willing to give up that power to destroy the CIA, and they killed him in public to make sure everyone got the message.
- jonnybgood 5y ago
  How does that work exactly? CIA: If you don’t let us torture people just because then we’ll make a scandal of you. President: Oh no. I guess I have to let you. I have no power whatsoever. Can’t get the FBI on it, because they’re blackmailing me too! The US government and intelligence agencies is not like what you see in the movies.
  - dls2016 5y ago
    > How does that work exactly? Jeffrey Epstein. Do you think it was coincidence that he had power of attorney over Les Wexner, who was involved with the notorious Southern Air Transport? There are many other intelligence connections, for instance Maxwell and her father. The CIA is really the worst institution in the US government.
    - Gollapalli 5y ago
      You speak as though Epstein and Maxwell were _American_ intelligence.
      - dls2016 5y ago
        Obviously, the (mountains of) circumstantial evidence suggests some sort of intelligence connection, with Maxwell's father having known ties to MI6, Mossad and even the KGB. But I don't think you'd be able to run around bribing billionaires like Leon Black under the guise of "tax advice" without the US authorities' involvement. Also, Southern Air Transport was a CIA front company.
  - michaelt 5y ago
    Presumably bogantech is thinking of the likes of J. Edgar Hoover - who had his federal agency spy on political leaders, and "amassed a great deal of power and was in a position to intimidate and threaten others, including multiple sitting presidents of the United States." according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Edgar_Hoover https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Edgar_Hoover
- joncp 5y ago
  More like: "Hey boss, remember JFK? It would be a real shame if something like that happened to you. Or your family."
  - foxyv 5y ago
    How long do you think the CIA would remain as a legitimate organization if something like that happened? All it would take is one public statement by a president that CIA had threatened them and the organization would come down like a house of cards. The entire leadership would be in handcuffs and trying to explain away treason to the FBI who would happily hand them over to military intelligence organizations to rendition their asses to their own prisons. There are tons of competing military intelligence organizations that would be happy to take over from there. The CIA as we know it would cease to exist in a matter of days.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - worik 5y ago
      > How long do you think the CIA would remain as a legitimate organization if something like that happened? It has been about seventy years so far.
    - tehwebguy 5y ago
      You are saying this in a thread for an article about how the CIA uses human beings as torture testers, where do you think the line is for them? lmao
  - mhh__ 5y ago
    Given that most presidents have huge egos that is a huge gamble for the CIA. All it takes is one tape to get out and then you've just started a civil war.
millzlane 5y ago
Well considering the Biden administration, like the Trump administration before it, said the information should not be disclosed because it would do significant harm to national security. The mention of national security makes me think the issue here is multi faceted.
- wl 5y ago
  The case the Supreme Court used to uphold the State Secrets privilege was, in retrospect, a coverup with no genuine national security issues. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Reynolds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Reynolds
- whatshisface 5y ago
  National security is not a get-out-of-democracy-free card. There has to be some way for public opinions about the CIA to loop back around to the congresspeople on the security council, otherwise the system won't work.
- mc32 5y ago
  The likely possibilities are, they all agree it’s necessary for reasons we don’t understand so they condone it—or, the power of the executive branch is diffuse and doesn’t always emanate from the Oval Office. I.e., the so called deep state, career bureaucracy and momentum hold more sway.
- bannedbybros 5y ago
pessimizer 5y ago
They were good at stopping us from prosecuting it, or the destruction of the evidence of it.
NoGravitas 5y ago
Obama ran for office on a pledge to close Guantanamo, and he could have done so by executive order. He didn't, and that should tell you all you need to know about the nature of the American presidency.
- dhosek 5y ago
  There was a HUGE faction in congress (they go by a name that rhymes with schmepublicans) that would have punished him severely if he had done that. The presidency is not as all-powerful as some people think it is, sometimes this is good, sometimes not so much.
  - pmoriarty 5y ago
    Punished him severely how? Trump did way more extreme things with impunity.
  - thissuchness 5y ago
    Punished him how? Were the schmepublicans not already turning up the drama dial to 11? What further recourse did they have to make things worse for him?
  - bell-cot 5y ago
    Early in a new President's first term, "I promised over and over to do X while I was running for President, and the American People very clearly voted for that" is d*mn good political cover for doing X.
    - tehwebguy 5y ago
      Not to mention, who cares? Do the thing or don’t be president.
  - nradov 5y ago
    When President Obama took office, Democrats controlled both the House and Senate. You can't hang this one on Republicans. Both parties were equal participants in keeping the Guantanamo detention facility open. Congress sets the annual federal budget. The Democrat controlled Congress literally allocated dollars to run that facility. If Democrats actually wanted to close it they could have eliminated funding, but they specifically chose to keep it multiple times.
elzbardico 5y ago
They are all part of the same system, a system which has only the trappings of a democracy, but in no practical sense is the government from the people, by the people to the people. It is just a giant gang warfare between warring plutocratic and bureaucratic factions. Trump, Biden, Bush, Obama. They all tortured, they all bombed, they all let people die without healthcare while spending billions in the biggest military machine of the world, for "defense". It is about time people wake up and stop letting those criminals divide us in their fictional turfs.
worik 5y ago
Obama was very bad. Made the use of robots to do extra judicial killings, state sanctioned murder, routine. What a shame.

mrtksn 5y ago

This is the kind of stuff that probably makes some people’s job down the pipe easier and at the same time undermines the Western civilization. Make no mistake, no US citizen outside of the political class benefits from this or other atrocities. The exact same goes for the surveillance programs. Losing the moral high ground degrades the whole society. The whole anti establishment movement rallies around stuff like this. The lefties and the right-wingers will be after different things but they will be able to come together on the hypocritical stance and corruption of the current system. It unites enemies against you who think that the most important thing is to bring down the current horrible governance and figure out things later.

adamsmith143 5y ago
Is it possible for you to construct a scenario where torture is morally acceptable? E.g. you have a virtual certainty that a dirty bomb is going to be detonated in NYC and will kill 1M+ and potentially irradiate the city for decades. Is torturing one person who you know with certainty knows the location of the bomb defensible? Basically, how many lives would you be willing to sacrifice to prevent the suffering of a single person?
- defen 5y ago
  Do we have any evidence that torture actually works? That the person being tortured will tell accurate information? Basically do we have any examples of this sort of situation, where there was an imminent threat to life and people were saved due to torture?
  - throwawaymanbot 5y ago
  - adamsmith143 5y ago
    >Basically do we have any examples of this sort of situation, where there was an imminent threat to life and people were saved due to torture? In the made up scenario you could make a case that even if there is a low probability of torture working, the scale of lives saved would make it worth it. A 20% chance of saving 1M people is still net +200k lives.

dingoegret12 5y ago

Christ this is beyond horrendous.

jMyles 5y ago

Holy shit. This is nauseating. Why do we tolerate the existence of the US state anymore? What's the point of any of this? I _hate_ the feeling of the smacking the back of my head. And they did it, against a plywood wall, by gripping a towel wrapped around his neck and slamming him into it, for two hours at a time, just to 'train' people. Everyone involved - perpetrators and victims - needs therapy and rehabilitation. The assailants need to sit down and apologize to this guy if they are ever going to be healthy humans again.

codr7 5y ago
Why? Fear, they know what they're doing.
dash2 5y ago
I think the perpetrators need to be tried, found guilty and put in jail. Then they can apologize if they want.
l33t2328 5y ago
> do we tolerate the existence of the US state anymore This is a ridiculous thing to say. I mean, what are you proposing? The whole world sanction the US?
- worik 5y ago
  >> do we tolerate the existence of the US state anymore > This is a ridiculous thing to say. I mean, what are you proposing? The whole world sanction the US? That would be a good start
- jMyles 5y ago
  I am proposing that the US state no longer exist. The use cases of a single government having domain over such a large land mass, when 50 smaller states are already defined and functioning, are dwindling amidst the information age. The crimes described in this article are utterly intolerable. Nobody wants this.
worik 5y ago

catchclose8919 5y ago

...isn't the whole idea of such "back sites" that once anyone gets into them, they are NEVER getting out alive? Torture and atrocities asside, I'd imagine most organized crime syndicates run tighter ships (eg. the standard dissolve the bodies of torture victims + kill the "torture service providers" too at regular intervals then re-recruit new ones etc.) ...this seem so beyond sloppy it's clearly a political s throwing play.

spacechild1 5y ago
I thought the same. But maybe they just do (have) not care. History has shown that the US can do all sorts of horrendous things and nothing ever seems to happen...
- pmoriarty 5y ago
  "History has shown that the US can do all sorts of horrendous things and nothing ever seems to happen..." Well, nothing except: 1 - make lots of enemies 2 - make the world a more dangerous place 3 - lose the moral high ground and the respect of people/countries who might have otherwise been friends These things have consequences... measured in American lives (which are, sadly, the only kind of lives some people care about)... but also in many other lives.
  - mandmandam 5y ago
    Up to 8 billion present human lives, trillions or qaudrillions of potential human lives, and uncountable animal and plant lives. That's not exaggeration. Those are the stakes America is fucking around with by provoking the world like this and spooking the shit out of everyone.
    - pmoriarty 5y ago
      It's not just America either... plenty of blame to go around. Power corrupts.

Sharlin 5y ago

> “Ammar fabricated the information he provided when undergoing EITs,” it said. “He later admitted to his interrogators/debriefers that he was terrified and lied to get agency officers to stop the measures … Ammar also explained that he was afraid to tell a lie and was afraid to tell the truth because he did not know how either would be received.” Which is pretty much all you need to know about torture.

torturedreading 5y ago
> Which is pretty much all you need to know about torture. When torture or "EIT" is used for a source of intelligence, using that sole point of data as proof is fraught with peril. Dropping JDAMs on a building fingered solely by a detainee is sure to get random bystanders killed. Running a raid, similarly, might well be a trap. However, when one corroborates this with other sources of data, it is a "valid" technique. When one uses a piece of intelligence from a detainee as a starting point and further validates the veracity of the claim, it is a "valid" starting point. This isn't to say whether or not this path counts as moral, just that the "torture doesn't work because lies" is itself dishonest.
- pmoriarty 5y ago
  "Dropping JDAMs on a building fingered solely by a detainee is sure to get random bystanders killed." Like that ever stopped anyone. "Collateral damage" they call it.
- shkkmo 5y ago
  My understanding is that rapport building techniques have a much better success rate.
  - e12e 5y ago
    Yeah, even nazi Germany realized that: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanns_Scharff https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanns_Scharff
- hammock 5y ago

_Marak_ 5y ago

Ouch

chmod775 5y ago

Wow. Now that was hard to read. The people who can do these things need to be locked away for the good of mankind. Start from the top.

typon 5y ago
>Start from the top. Precisely. I think if the US wants to be a global hegemon without having a bankrupt/hypocritical liberal ideology, a good way to start would be with locking up Bush, Cheney, and the rest of the neocons responsible for the Iraq War for a life sentence. Obama, Clinton and the rest of the administration officials responsible for Libya, Syria, and the drone assassination program. We don't even need to go that far back to prosecute all living presidents (even though in a just world, we would), but this would be a good start. Anything less means that US participation in international institutions like ICJ is just a farce (like how Saudi Arabia has a seat on the UN HRC)

upofadown 5y ago

>The interrogators were convinced that Baluchi knew more than he was saying because he was a nephew of the self-proclaimed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, Khaled Sheikh Mohammed. Repressive regimes often make a point of persecuting family members. It sends the message that resistance will cause terrible things to happen to those you love, not just you. The torture works toward that end in this case.

sneak 5y ago
It almost makes one wonder if there is no such thing as a regime that isn't "repressive", given that the one most loudly trumpeting the rule of law and righteousness engages in the exact same blatantly criminal acts as all of the other ones they like to vilify as being without the rule of law. There are precisely zero states that have the power to torture with impunity that don't use it to, well, torture with impunity. It's a decades old running gag and common TV trope in the US-and-A that you'll get raped in prison if you get locked up. Everyone truly knows that the concept of equal protection under the law is just a joke, but we keep on as if the emperor were fully clothed. Now that we've got a real honest-to-goodness war (with associated war crimes) happening in the only region of this planet that seemed at present to have a snowball's chance in hell of actually maintaining peace and human rights, I'm beginning to wonder if large groups of humans are even capable of actually having, you know, a civilization. It's not lookin' good. I will remain pathologically optimistic, however.

xyst 5y ago

"Enhanced interrogation techniques" is one of the reasons why the US no longer recognizes the ICC jurisdiction.

sschueller 5y ago
It never did. The Bush admin even passed a bill to pull anyone sent to it out by force in necessary. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Protection_Act https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_...
ganzuul 5y ago
And why the world no longer recognized the US jurisdiction on anything. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
worik 5y ago
Their routine use of torture is one of the reasons why the US no longer recognizes the ICC jurisdiction. Can we not use the euphemisms?

c7DJTLrn 5y ago

Disgusting. May the people who participated go to the same level of hell as the 9/11 perpetrators.

fractalfinity 5y ago

Tepix 5y ago

Reading this makes me sick and doubt humanity. The ongoing Assange case comes to mind. A farce if i've ever seen one.

2xpress 5y ago
And isn't it ironic that a US citizen is currently laying low in Putin's Moscow, of all places, because he does not expect a fair or humane treatment from the US judicial system over his alleged "crimes".

tored 5y ago

EU should put sanctions on top US leadership and many of the large US based corporations, especially in businesses like banking, media and technology.

Extropy_ 5y ago
What do you think that will accomplish?
- tored 5y ago
  Short term: keep US responsible for their actions, otherwise this will just continue. Long term: a broader separation of US and EU interest, EU does not benefit from many of the US imperial policies, it actually loses on many of them.
etotolkoya 5y ago
oh, you think that EU is independent :) how old are you?
- tored 5y ago
  As I explained in my response I want EU to become more independent from US https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30688930 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30688930

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

pandemicsoul 5y ago

Bonkers reading through this thread and seeing people discuss torture as casually and unemotionally as if it were just a regular ol' anyday thing. Like wow folks, this is not academic!

gerbilly 5y ago
That's HN for you. I honestly don't know why I keep coming here. This is a safe space for rationalisation, we can't let 'the feels' creep in and threaten that. Also it would be way too 'political' if we assigned a moral valence to torture, and political discussions are discouraged here.
- worik 5y ago
  Weighing torture, in light of "if it is effective it is OK" is not "rationalisation". It is loosing the civilisation plot.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- cheeze 5y ago
  But it's totally okay to get political about COVID and deny, deny, deny here. Such an odd cross section of libertarian "freedom above all else" people and legitimately smart technical folks. I like the technical part, the "this is binary and I believe in freedom above all else" cohort turns me off pretty hard though.
  - gerbilly 5y ago
    > "this is binary and I believe in freedom above all else" cohort turns me off pretty hard though. Randroids probably. Ayn Rand is piss poor literature, and even worse as philosophy or life advice.
  - dc-programmer 5y ago
    Anything short of libertarian anarchy is a dystopia to these folks. You would actually think that people with a “rationalist” bias would care more about outcomes than elevating deontological ideals above all else but I guess not

cwkoss 5y ago

If our country was just, everyone in the CIA who engaged in or authorized torture would be executed. I'm typically against capital punishment, but state sanctioned torture is such a far line past what is acceptable, I really think we'd be better off if we swept all these evil people off the face of the planet. Instead, they get cushy think tank and consultancy jobs as a reward for their evil 'service'.

runeks 5y ago
> […] I really think we'd be better off if we swept all these evil people off the face of the planet. That’s exactly what your alleged enemy thinks.
sneak 5y ago
The right not to be tortured and the right to not be murdered (by the state or anyone else) are practically uttered in the same breath. You can't fix violence with more violence, you have to fix violence with cleverness.
- cwkoss 5y ago
  What is the clever path to fixing an unaccountable branch of government who keeps secrets from the people meant to oversee it to cover up their egregious acts? They are effectively a rogue criminal organization with the power of state protection at this point. Making an example of the criminal acts we do have knowledge of seems the only effective recourse short of dismantling the CIA entirely.
  - sneak 5y ago
    I think that literally the only way to dismantle the CIA and other blatantly and obviously criminal portions of the US government without using violence is to spread wide the fact that they are a portion of the government that operates entirely outside of the rule of law, and that we can't be said to actually have the rule of law/democracy/freedom/etc if it doesn't apply equally to everyone. If enough people shout about the emperor's nakedness enough times, eventually it will jump the gap from something everyone knows, to common knowledge[1] (something everyone knows that everyone knows). They will have to fall into disrepute, and that won't happen by us being quiet about it. Right now, I think most people in the US think of the US as a place with the rule of law, and equal application thereof. The CIA's well-documented activities illustrate plainly that that is not true. The well-publicized summary executions of unarmed people by the police without trial or jury are getting noticed more often, as well. We can say it in plain words, often, to bring it to the level of common sense. The vast, vast majority of people would like to live in a place with the rule of law, applied fairly and equally to all people. An even higher percentage would be on board without the rule of law, just so long as no special connected elites get unique treatment and free taxpayer money. This is a big tent. There will, of course, be a subset of the population at all times that wants gun-toting, black-bag Jack Bauer 007 "license to kill" daddy to run around and exercise their best super reliable adult judgement and eschew the entire time-consuming nonsense of arrest and human rights and trial and just put a blowtorch to the balls of the Completely Obviously Guilty Bad Terrorist Guy immediately, as we have immortalized in so much of our entertainment. But I remain resolute in my belief that those people are a small minority of human beings, and are shrinking every generation. There isn't a month of my life that goes by that I am not beaming proud of the human race that we even gave the fucking nazis full on courtroom trials after WW2. If that doesn't show that we can absolutely get there on a long enough timescale, I don't know what does. The usual tropes apply: - sunlight is the best disinfectant - teach, listen, learn - treat others as you wish to be treated - always stand up for the truth We've been improving for thousands of years. In another few we'll get there yet. [1]: https://www.epsilontheory.com/inflation-and-the-common-knowledge-game/ https://www.epsilontheory.com/inflation-and-the-common-knowl... https://www.epsilontheory.com/sheep-logic/ https://www.epsilontheory.com/sheep-logic/

CrzyLngPwd 5y ago

ugh, that was hard to read.

rl3 5y ago

A neuropsychologist carried out an MRI of Baluchi’s head in late 2018 and found “abnormalities indicating moderate to severe brain damage” in parts of his brain, affecting memory formation and retrieval as well as behavioral regulation. The specialist found that the “abnormalities observed were consistent with traumatic brain injury.” Awful. I kind of wonder if this ignorance extends to training their own field agents at The Farm where they do mock torture. Unlike Hollywood, taking a few blows to the head tends to be deleterious rather than toughening one up. Potentially even disabling or fatal.

vmception 5y ago

Reads like cause for a special military operation against the people that allow this

sneak 5y ago

The CIA has a venture capital arm, called In-Q-Tel, which invests in tech companies. Many of you reading this have coworkers who share a cap table with this organization. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30628667 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30628667 Those of you who work at Amazon, your employer built and operates a special custom, airgapped datacenter at Langley for this organization. When you write library code that makes AWS services better, you also enrich this organization and make them more effective at carrying out these types of operations (like actively hacking into the computers in the US Congress that were used by the congresspeople who provide oversight to the CIA, to delete evidence of torture, getting caught doing the hacking and evidence tampering, and subsequently lying to Congress about the hacking). https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/the-details-about-the-cias-deal-with-amazon/374632/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/the-d...

anon_2022 5y ago

Making the post as anon. I fully support the CIA to use torture even on US Citizens. If you're caught planning a terror attack or something similar that could cause mass loss of life, torture is a reasonable last resort to extract information from a suspect

tehwebguy 5y ago
The shame you feel for your opinion is a good start
dqpb 5y ago
Let’s say you confiscate a computer. What do you gain by bashing it against a wall?
CyanBird 5y ago
Sure, but this guy wasn't caught planning anything, he was just a rando family member and as the article mentions the cia itself already assessed that was the case, that he wasn't a danger Yet they decided to use him as a training dummy anyway, why? Because the cia is just fucking evil and it ought have been disbanded in the 1960s with JFK Anyhow, what I just wish is that more world powers had their own CIAs and dedicated themselves to hunt down and kill US cia agents as needed to defend their national sovereignty and population The US doesn't understand anything but violence, I just wish there were more tools to deter the US from using it, forcing it to a dialogue table, terrorist country.

dqpb 5y ago

CIA employees who engaged in this behavior should be treated as terrorists who sought to undermine the legitimacy of the US government.

gambler 5y ago

I am sure after learning this all Americans will take to the streets and after a massive protest the government will defund CIA and prosecute everyone responsible for the related crimes. Right? And if that doesn't happen, European companies will cancel American accounts, IKEA will close shop here, GOG will refuse to sell games in US, etc, etc. Right? Because, as I've learned on HN in the last two weeks, all citizens are responsible for what their government is doing, regardless of their knowledge or level of support for the practice.

egisspegis 5y ago
I'm sure they will when US starts carpet bombing Canada's cities.
- apocolyps6 5y ago
  So the Middle East and South America is okay but Canada is off limits?
  - CyanBird 5y ago
    I mean, of course You don't ever see anything about the invasions of Grenada or Panama, let alone all the murk that the US does with Haiti, heck Puerto Rico is not even a state but a US Caribbean colony, the US used to torture the separatists leaders of Puerto Rico with Radiation https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/50-years-since-Death-of-Puerto-Rican-Leader-Tortured-By-US-20150421-0036.html https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/50-years-since-Death-of-... I am posting telesur purposely btw, if anyone else cares go read the wiki
PoignardAzur 5y ago
> Because, as I've learned on HN in the last two weeks, all citizens are responsible for what their government is doing, Yup. They absolutely are. There is no way the US's long history of human right abuses would have gone on for so long if the american people weren't fundamentally okay with it. Doesn't mean anything will be done about it.

jakobdabo 5y ago

Those students must have been real proud that they passed the exam with high marks. Now I wonder what type of exams are designed for the drone operators.

2xpress 5y ago
https://old.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/86sc4h/three_students_at_the_cia_academy_were_about_to/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/86sc4h/three_student...

theknocker 5y ago

Gollapalli 5y ago

I think it’s worth noting that the United States has not won a war since the CIA was formed. They seem a useless liability that gives us a bad name. Perhaps we should move intelligence work back under the domain of the military, how it was before 1941. We could put the marines in charge of the CIA’s mission, that mission being expeditionary intelligence (and not torturing people on black sites).

rramadass 5y ago

From Orwell's "Notes on Nationalism" Indifference to Reality - All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. ... Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage – torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians – which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side.

2xpress 5y ago

How come the article is not naming who was doing the torturing, and does not mention anynothing regarding attempting to contact the office of the US Attorney General to ask why no criminal charges have been filed?

afroboy 5y ago

This type of subjects always feed the hate against USA, it's matter of time till they get the next 9/11.

throwawaymanbot 5y ago