Slashdot Mirror
CIA Blogger Fired for Criticizing Torture Policy
PetManimal writes "A contract software developer for the CIA who had a blog on the CIA intranet was fired after criticizing torture in an entry. The title of the post: something along the lines of 'Waterboarding is Torture and Torture is Wrong.' The Washington Post reports Christine Axsmith is not the only CIA blogger -- the spy agency uses blogs to let agents and other workers share information and ideas." From the article: "Hundreds of blog posts appear on Intelink. The CIA says blogs and other electronic tools are used by people working on the same issue to exchange information and ideas. CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano declined to comment on Axsmith's case but said the policy on blogs is that 'postings should relate directly to the official business of the author and readers of the site, and that managers should be informed of online projects that use government resources. CIA expects contractors to do the work they are paid to do.'"
2) For those wondering - waterboarding
Charming thing for a civilized country to be practicing & defending.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
I don't get it... the CIA doesn't torture people. The USA doesn't torture people. Why should the CIA care if a contractor says torture is wrong? They must have fired her for goofing off on company time/equipment.
--
make install -not war
Im I the only one wondering what the hell this has to do with our online rights?? It was on a private INTRANET for god sakes...
Keep a low profile.
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
If an employee does something you don't like, as an employer you can easily fire them for some other infraction... just dust off your unused copy of the employee handbook.
she was only fired and not tortured for her views on torture.
I was working for a huge meat packing company and we had internal company blogs so we could share ideas and generally make the company run better. You know, totally Web 2.0. I am a committed vegan so I posted a blog entry called "Meat is Murder and Murder is Wrong" and guess what happened to me? I was fired! Can you believe that!?!?!? Freaking fascists.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Have any of the posters expressed approval of the government or CIA in a non-work related fashion and not been fired?
If they fire contractors who "waste" time, that's okay.
If they only fire contractors who "waste" time criticizing the government, that's not okay.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
http://econo-girl.blogspot.com/
from the BoingBoing story a day or two ago..
A contract software developer for the CIA was kidnapped and tortured by the CIA. Details to follow.
http://religiousfreaks.com/Make as much noise about torture as possible.
Developers: We can use your help.
What happens when you are the one on the board because... *gasp* a mistake!
Have you fscked your local propeller head today?
Your ideas intrigue me. Please tell me more about how torturing children will keep them safe from terrorists. Also, I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
I choose to remain celibate, like my father and his father before him.
Certainly I can understand the issues involved with firing someone who posts an anti-torture blog. It just has "bad idea" written all over it. On the other hand this was an internal blog that she would have had to have written at work. I strongly suspect that rather than a "blog" these things are meant to just be an internal work diary recording what projects you've been working on, progress you've made and ideas relating to those projects, so that others that may have tangential interest in those projects can stay updated. The sort of thing where person A says "I really need something like X", they can do a quick search of the internal system and find that person B has is working on a project similar to X, and that in fact it will also do Y and Z which, now that they think about it, person A would also be interested in. Person A can then get in touch with person B and save themselves much duplication of effort. If that's the case then you have to admit that spending work time long writing Op-Ed pieces in your work diary instead of whatever you are supposed to be doing might be a good reason for someone to terminate your work contract.
This is also the sort of thing where, despite needing to really know a bit more to be able to make any reasonable judgement, we are simply never going to hear anymore due to secrecy constraints. I guess that means I'll just flag it as "mildly dubious" and keep an eye out for any more of this sort of shenanigans.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
and the victim is unlikely to actually die if this is done by skilled practitioners.
Who'd they practice on before they became so skilled?
Gov't Torturer: I only lost 3 this week.
Superior: Good enough. Here's your "Skilled in Waterboarding" cert. And no, I don't want to know what you did with the bodies.
Gov't Torturer: Thanks. BTW, you might want to avoid the "mystery meat" at the cafeteria.
So, let us review. A software developer had access to a blog set up specifically for collaborating on software issues. She instead uses it as an opinion journal, and even go so far as to reveal classified information that she has seen in the course of her previous job. Regardless of the clearance required to access the site, she shouldn't have been using the resource the way she was and she certainly shouldn't have been discussing interogation transcripts in her roll as a software developer!
Being fired seems like the logical concequence.
Sounds like the contractor was being paid to do one thing but was instead "blogging" about this. Title should read "contractor fired for improper use of company time."
Criticize your employer and be prepared for the consequences, including job termination, even if you are 100% correct. No one should be surprised. Hopefully the woman in the article has another job lined up.
....is beyond me. People are writing things about their companies on blogs and getting fired for it. Why is that such a suprise? If belittle your company in a public place and hurt their image, why shouldn't you be fired.
Now, this was an internal blog that was actually used BY the CIA employees to discuss information that may be needed...this type of post was uncalled for and deserved a punishment, though maybe a suspension would do. Blogs are nothing but a way to get in trouble.
That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable.
But it shouldn't happen in the government. I think the problem here is he used the intranet. If he posted to his own public website he might not have been fired. And if he had only posted to his own site then he definitely should not have been fired.
Developers: We can use your help.
Maybe if you want to keep your job you should keep your mouth shut and not criticize your employeer. There are plenty of people who can fight the fight for you, we are all well aware that the CIA practices waterboarding on foreign nationals on a regular basis. And occationally it is practiced in government institutions against American citizens (prisons and mental hospitals).
It has shown many times that torture often produces falses confessions, so I'm skeptical of its effectiveness for gathering information. I will not deny its effectiveness for punishment though. Punishment that leaves no scars is a step up from the usual beatings that take place.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Go read the actual article: she was fired for writing about the contents of a transcript of an interrogation she read.
This was undoubtedly at least SECRET codeword information, and she posted it on a network where, with certainty, not everyone on the network had been "read into" the compartment. In other words, she violated "need to know."
So they pulled her clearance, and since clearance was required for her job, they fired her.
She's lucky they didn't arrest her. Dammit, "I don't like this" is not a sufficient reason for violating classification.
I call bullshit. Do you think the situation for women has gotten much better now that Afganistan is free from the Taliban?
If by "better" you mean "women are no longer dragged out into what used to be a soccer field in front of a crowd at lunchtime and shot in the head for daring to teach their daughters to read," then... yes, better.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I can't tell if Sir Buzz is being fecetious or actually believes what he wrote. Whichever it is, his statement needs to be countered, lest someone actually buy into that line of nonsense.
"osake no hou ga, biiru yori ii" to omotteiru.
"If by "better" you mean "women are no longer dragged out into what used to be a soccer field"
Oh, that still happens, just not in the major cities. Town/Village centers suffice if there is a lack of a soccer field. Also they don't send out invitations or make public announcements. Smaller crowds but the end result is pretty much the same.
The current quibble is whether this ammendment applies to non-citizens as it does to citizens.
It's pretty sad that the only thing apparently keeping the government from torturing us is that some people have a right not to be tortured.
I also find it very interesting that you infer terrorism == islam == ancient african custom that happens to be in force in an area that is mostly muslim. Israel bad Israel strange construction. Settle occupied land long time. Aboriginals hate good. peace at any cost Yep. Equitable peace at any cost. Do you mean you prefer this forever war?
...and as a final thought
I put it to you that Evil does not exist. It's a figment of your religious mind. In reality, people do bad things for reasons that seem good at the time.
I choose to remain celibate, like my father and his father before him.
Because the best thing a person who has issues with torture can do is to make sure one of the few groups that does it has no dissenting voices.
I can't speak for those "other countries", but the Canadian constitutional applies to everyone, citizen and non-citizen alike, just like the rest of the laws.
It's also why we're reluctant to extradite death-penalty cases unless we get assurances that the death penalty won't apply. Once they're here, they have the same right not to be put to death for a crime as anyone else.
It must work - our murder rate is 1/3 the US rate.
It's a place of employment, not a public forum for discussing social policy. Posting personal opinions on a company network is asking for trouble.
Also... people... read the article. It indicates her "security badge was revoked". If the government yanked or suspended her security clearance, she would no longer be able to access classified material or work on classified projects. If this is indeed what happened (the wording is a bit vague), then her employer had no choice but to fire her, as she was no longer able to perform her duties. BAE Systems is mostly a government defense contractor, so all of their programming positions may have required security clearance.
She made a dumb move by flagrantly criticizing the organization that contracted her employer. I know there are more than a few places where I would have gotten into severe trouble for doing exactly what she did. I'm not saying I'm sure I would have been fired, but it's something to at least think about first. Sniping at the organization that hired your employer is *never* wise, and I honestly wonder what was going through this woman's head. In the race to scream about censorship, I think some of us are forgetting that her decision was ill-advised by professional standards.
On the other hand, I would question the thought process of whomever decided to pull her security clearance. Was this decision subject to the normal procedure or review? Did the government overseer overreact (or intentionally respond) in a way that forced BAE to fire her without good cause, or was this another incident in a long line of discontented grumblings that made it look like her political attitudes went against the contracting agency? If this is the case, it may have been wise to yank her clearance. Having people work with organizations they despise is not particularly prudent, especially when it involves exposure to sensitive issues. This could be knee-jerk management, it could be pettiness, or it could be a prudent handling of an employee whose attitude was increasingly hostile to the organization for which she was employed. Without further details, I'm not sure there is a way to figure out which of these it is.
---
According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
Oh, it was on a BLOG on an INTRANET...Here we have a contractor who did something the employer didn't like. Employer fires contractor. End of story.
I take it you don't understand the difference between private companies and government actions? A private company can fire you for saying something. If the government takes any action to get you fired for saying something, they have violated the First amendment in the Bill of rights and broken the law.
I can tell you that generally contracts are written...
Who cares. It doesn't matter what the contract you signed says, it does not mean the government can break the law. If you have a contract that says you can be fired for any reason, fine, but if a government agent payed for with my tax dollars went to your workplace and tried to convince your boss to fire you because you are jewish, or black, or for something you said, or because you own a firearm, they have just broken the law.
I'm striving to underdstand your logic. You claim that the USA is civilized because it has laws banning torture. Yet, in spite of the fact that We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, there is uncertainty over whether the illegality of torture applies to non-citizens. This would suggest that non-citizens are not all men, but something else. Indeed, this wholly undermines any claims that the outlawing of torture are based on moral considerations. How can it be moral not to torture me, but to torture my neighbour?
The USA may guarantee freedom of speech. But it doesn't gaurantee freedom from execution from the state -- and many other things. Furthermore, when you think about recent concepts such as 'free speech zones', you see that the utility of freedom of speech extends only as far as the 'right' can be excercised -- which in the current US political climae is not very far at all.
Finally, if you use countries that practice infanticide or honor killing as your yardstick, then something is wrong. After Abu Ghraib, I heard people like yourself pointing out that 'at least we aren't as bad as Saddam was'. This sort of reasoning strikes me as very worrying.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
From Baby it's cold outside
Oh, that still happens, just not in the major cities. Town/Village centers suffice if there is a lack of a soccer field. Also they don't send out invitations or make public announcements. Smaller crowds but the end result is pretty much the same.
No, it's not the same. Yes, Afghanistan has long been a fractured place with a wide range of local cultural pockets ranging from Cool to Insane. But the Taliban moved in and said, "Now there's a central authority here, and a dominant theocratic culture that we will enforce at the point of a gun, and one feature of that culture, country-wide, is: women who try to get a job (even if we've killed her husband), or who teach daughters to read will be put to death."
Of course it's horrid that there are spots in that country where that same attitude still exists. But the difference is that now there is no longer a "government" that directly embraces and celebrates that medieval nonsense by actually having government employees who run around and do that evil crap. It will be at least a generation before it becomes culturally embarassing, for more like a majority of Afghanis, to have that stuff happening in their more rural areas. But the difference is crucial: before, it was the law of land, and now it's not.
Just like it took a while before some people in the deep south of the US stopped openly lynching blacks (and getting a nudge-nudge-wink-wink from the local law enforcement). Now, such a think is loudly, and instantly condemned from every meaningful corner of the culture, and perpetrators of such crimes get what they deserve. The Taliban was still running the courts and what passes for law enforcement in Afghanistan just five years ago. This stuff takes a little while - but to suggest that there's no difference between the two conditions is absurd. Both in philosophical and practical terms.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
What quibble are you talking about? The current administration has asserted that even US citizens apprehended on US soil can be classified as enemy combatants and held outside of the usual (criminal, military) prison systems.
The quibble I'm concerned with is whether the laws of the nation apply to everyone, or if the president and his cronies are exempt.
But hey, it's a free country, so if you want to be ignorant and WRONG, go right ahead.
i find it a little uncivilized that there is question as to weither the Bill of Rights applys to non-citizens, but im pritty damn sure that your speeding laws apply no matter what country you were born in
...whether the person being tortured did it or not.
Confessing to a crime is always better than being tortured by another.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
It was an internal company blog, using the company's facilities (paid for my the US taxpayer, not Mrs. Axsmith), so it's like e-mail. A little discretion should be shown. We all know about firings due to e-mail -- it happens all the time.
BTW, Mrs. Axsmith is also lawyer, so I wonder if she should have known better.
So when will we have a White House press release accusing Washington Post of endangering National Security by revealing that the CIA has records of using waterboarding torture?
You're right - correlation isn't causation.
Take the murders caused by hand guns out of the US stats, and our murder rates are similar.
Guns don't kill - stupid people with guns kill.
Per capita, Canada has more firearms, but WAY less hand guns, than the US. There's the causative difference - pretty much unregulated hand gun ownership.
The UK and Germany are signatories of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), and have both integrated the chapters into their respective legislatures. See Article Ten of the ECHR, which concerns itself with, and is entitled, the right to freedom of expression, and Article Three, which prohibits torture regardless of nationality.
I find interesting the cognitive dissonance that allows for members of the right-wing to claim that there is an objective moral authority above and beyond the laws of man on issues like gay rights but that only the law and points of technicalities of citizenship are all that matters when the ability to torture foreigners suspected of knowing terrorists is on the line. Pick one or the other, and if you pick the "objective moral authority" side, then do try and strain your brain to think of what Jesus would've thought of torturing people to save your own skin.
There's no quibble about whether the 4th, 5th, 6th, and 8th Amendments apply to our current law enforcement procedures. The restrictions are on the government, and they apply anywhere the government acts, and nowhere in the amendments is government only barred from action against citizens. Go, and see if you can find limitations to bar injustice against citizens only in the Constitution. Furthermore, given the results of Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld, it's pretty damn clear that torturing people is flat out illegal in the opinion of the Supreme Court.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
"The current quibble is whether this ammendment applies to non-citizens as it does to citizens."
Nonsense. The amendment clearly restricts the authority of Government. It does NOT confer a Right on a Citizen: The Right already exists by virtue of the fact that they are a Person. (You remember that whole "We hold these truths to be self evident, blah blah, endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights..."
The Government has no authority to perform cruel and unusual punishment on any person. They are explicitly forbidden to do so by the Constitution. You are absolutely wrong, as is everybody who agrees with you, up to and including the President.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Or maybe it just means Canadians are horrible shots...
"But this one goes to 11!"
The woman in question was working for a CIA contractor, and the duties for which she was given access were software testing.
FYI, just having a security clearance is not enough to work at a particular facility. You need the requisite clearance AND access. Access is at the absolute discretion of whoever is running the facility.
Contractors in such a setting are always in a precarious circumstance. In many ways, they're encouraged to feel like part of the team, but they're not. Contractors who become nuisances or whose choices require the customer to spend time and effort usually get their access yanked.
At one place I worked, incoming contractors were explicitly cautioned about all the way in which some of their predecessors had gotten their access yanked. Because our customer was the only one the company had, losing your access to the customer's facitily meant you got fired. Some of the reasons that had resulted in losing access seemed incredibly petty.
I can think of many reasons this woman lost her access. The biggest problem is that she used her customer's computer system to criticize that very customer! As a contractor to the US government, she should have just known better than to critique foreign policy on a CIA intranet. A secondary problem is that she based her opinions on an interrogation transcript for which she apparently had need-to-know at some point. However, it's inappropriate in that setting to share even the fact that she had access to the transcript with anyone who didn't have a need to know about that.
Contractors who think independently and who aren't willing to follow even the most picayune of the customer's rules are problems (from the customer's point of view) that are very easily solved.
I'm not saying that I disagree with her comments or that I don't think this is all much ado about nothing. However, she should have seen that extending her comments from funny discussions about the cafeteria food to her opinion of the country's foreign policy was turning her into a nail that was sticking up. If there's one thing that places like the CIA can do very well, it's knowing how to hammer down any nail that sticks up.
Can you provide a single example of an American citizen being dragged from US soil to be held as an enemy combatant without due process? A link to a reputable news source would be sufficient.
How about the BBC?
...sometimes, in order to hurt someone very badly, you have to tell that person terrible lies. - PA
yes, it is your fault, you voted didnt you?. And if you didnt, then it's still your fault as you didnt do your duty to ensure that your voice was heard.
There are 3rd party options and if you (and enough people like you) are as fed up with "the way things are" as you say you are to vote for someone who isnt in the red or the blue. They may just win and do something you actually support insted of moaning about how you have no say while you waste your ballot, or vote for someone you dont like.
The reason he has to used honor-killings as a yardstick is because of people like you have who have absolutely no perspective.
I reject this argument entirely. Looking to the lowest common denominator and striving to be "a little better than they are" is sickening. We should strive to be the best at everything and look to the best at any given thing for our ideals. Anything else results in not reason, but rationalization of wrongdoing. "Someone else is still worse," is no excuse for wrongdoing.
Dude. That's pretty messed up. Read up more on the subject.
Salient points to consider:
- People think they're drowning to death. The terror response to this is wired into the most primitive parts of our brain. It's the mental equivalent of hitting below the belt.
- The average person lasts 14 seconds before caving in.
- The toughest prisoner they had lasted two minutes before begging them to stop.
- This isn't "getting a swirly" in a high school locker room. This is being convinced that people who hate you are in the process of trying to kill you.
You have to be completely lacking in the human trait known as empathy to consider this "sissified." I'd love to see how well you hold up to this kind of treatment, especially if no one's taught you that it's unlikely that you'll actually die from the water you're inhaling while struggling to breathe.People subjected to this can be traumatized for life afterwords and may develop phobias of water from it.
(Note, once again, that even people taught what the procedure is rarely last more than a few seconds under it.)
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
But seriously, do you believe she would have been fired if the content of her speech had been something else?
I agree with the substance of your post There is a problem with the "all men are created equal" part. The Founding Fathers of the USA did not actually mean that all human beings are equal. They meant that all white, male, christians of a certain seniority, income and social standing are created equal. The 'equality' part has been gradually extended over the years to include young, poor white males, women (sheesh!) and non-whites. If one wants to be picky, the line should read "all men are created equal except..."
This culture of exception to the rule is still prevalent. The US is obliged to adhere to the Geneva Convention except, says the administration, in Guantanamo. The administration is obliged to adhere to the US Constitution except, says the administration, when that makes things awkward. The US prizes Free Speech except, says the American People, where that speech is used to criticise the US (case in point the firing of the blogger for criticising the administration's torture policy
I find it odd that in a nation that was born in a struggle for self-determination and to hold its rulers accountable, people are so ready to abrogate that responsibility. The citizens of the US have a constitutional obligation to hold their government to account and to make that government justify its actions.
Lastly I agree with your comment about comparison. My wife does the same. Whenever she has been caught doing something wrong, her response is to find something that can make the accuser 'even wronger' thus forcing THEM to apologise so she doesn't have to. This also seems to work on a global scale - "If it wasn't for whiny, liberal people like you we wouldn't need to break the Constitution - you made us do it"
Travelling forward in time at a rate of 1 second per second.
I'm not sure what time frame you are using when considering that "The US used to be civilized"...
I pretty much consider the current peak of our civilization to have been the late 90s. We were moving towards a more tolerant society. We were widely respected for the freedom of our culture. We worked with the international community to end a civil war and genocide in Kosovo. We looked to the future with hope and expectation, and there was always a sensation that America was moving forward towards fairness and justice, and to me that forward motion IS civilization.
Civilization is ethical, moral, and cultural growth. Stagnation is just decay. One of these days we might reach a plateau where everything is as fair as it can be, and I'd have to change my definition of being civilized, but we are centuries or millenia away from that point if it's even achievable.
Post 1999-2001, the nation has changed. We actually have news and media personalities that try to convince people that torture and detention without fair trial is a good and just thing. We stoke up fears about Arabs and Mexicans daily. We are widely hated for arrogant policies that have stalled and actually reversed the world's progress on human rights. We are bogged down in an occupation that is leading to a civil war that is killing more people than the evil dictator we displaced had done in over a decade. The future is now something to fear and dread instead of something to hope for.
America has done better, and I think that it can do better again, but people are going to have to come face to face with what we've become and act with determination to save our nation's very soul.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
How do you define "equitable". Israel has given 98% of what Palistine has asked.
That's a farsical assertion. Israel still wants to permanently keep some of the best land in the West Bank and to deny the Palestinians the use of East Jerusalem as a capital. They've built a wall through the West Bank that cuts off portions of the land belonging to Palestine to make a de facto land grab. The abandonment of Gaza was explicitly done around the idea of consolidating the hold over the West Bank.
Israel's version of peace and a Palestinian state leaves them with complete control over the airspace over Palestinian territory, the waters, and the borders, leaving them imprisoned. It takes away the best land and the capital that they have their hearts set on. It provides no sharing of access to the Temple Mount and the Dome of the Rock. They don't care to set up the travel corridors between the two segments provided for in the Oslo peace accord.
It also does nothing for the "right of return" that the Palestinians grudingly gave up in that peace accord. That isn't "98% of what they asked for" in the peace accords, much less 98% of what they actually want (and probably shouldn't get; I don't like the idea of right of return at this late of a date).
Personally, I think Israel has bent over backwards trying to live in peace with its neighbors. Meanwhile, the surrounding countries have people sworn to the destruction of all Jews.
Israeli settlers are also religious fanatics dedicated to the idea of displacing all the Arabs from the area they claim for Greater Israel. Some believe that the statements made by God in the Pentateuch and later books like Joshua and Judges are still in effect and that Israel must conquer all the lands given to them in those passages. Most Israelis are more reasonable than that, though.
So, please define "equitable" in terms that don't allow more bombs to be lobbed into a soverign state from its neighbors.
How 'bout a definition that doesn't allow either side to lob bombs into their neighbors.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Hmm....where in my OP did I ever mention a person's race? Granted, NOLA is where my most recent experience comes from, and the projects are predominately black...but, the proportion of blacks to whites pre-Katrina was very lopsided...like near 70/25 or so for black/white. However, I again didn't speak to race...IMHO, it is more of a poverty thing if extrapolated to the rest of the US with more balanced populations. And if you can get and look at the charts the NOPD put out in years past with markings of the murders in the city, you could plainly see the dense areas of murder, where around the housing projects, which also coincided with where most drug dealing took place...at least in the open.
I agree with you, no one should be above the law, but, with limited resources, and what I think to be common sense...my worst crime fear is violent crime..murder in particular. I'd much rather limited resources be dedicated to preventing and cleaning up hotbeds of violence. While all crime is bad...at least you are still breathing in the end if you aren't murdered. I'd rather have the cops going after a murderous person or gang rather than sitting with a radar gun looking for a normal citizen trying to get to work about 10 mph over the limit. Let's face it, some crimes are worse than others, and need to be addressed as such.
But again...I said nothing in my OP that was racist at all. Just stating what my experience, and what the numbers/stats of my city in the past proved to be...I cannot think that the truth, no matter which way it points can be racist...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Poverty has nothing to do with the criminal mentality, and everything to do with the chance you have of getting caught. Yes poverty can motivate a person to commit crimes to survive, but a greedy rich person will commit crimes to keep up with their rich neighbors and stay ahead just as quickly. The difference is, white collar criminals almost never get caught, and when they do it's a slap on the wrist. Tabacco drug dealers, and Pharma drug dealers sell drugs all the time which are harmful, like Viox, and none of them go to prison for it because they can pay a fine. Even the big marijuana dealers, who deal in tons, and who operate in other countries are immune for political reasons.
The end result is, only the stupid drug dealer, who sells drugs by walking up to people and asking "wanna buy some drugs?" gets caught. Stupid criminals get caught, smart criminals almost never get caught, and thats the only point to make.
I agree with you completely, I think we should elimate the drug laws, and regulate drugs on safety, as a form of quality control. The more money we spend going after marijuana dealers the more money we arent spending going after the murderers. In gangwars, most gangsters arent killers or murderers, they are just like you and me, but because of the environment they live in, the lack of oppurtunity, the lack of education and in some cases dyslexia and inability to read, their options are a life of McDonalds or a life of crime. Most people in these desperate situations have nothing to lose.
We also must remember, that the entire world is just a group of gangs, factions, groups, networks. Yes there are street gangs, but theres gangs of lawyers, doctors, and everything else. Basically everyone is in some sorta group or community, including the slashdotter open source community which could just as easily be labeled a gang by anti open source groups.
We have to start viewing street kids as people, and yes maybe they are just as scared of being shot as you, and maybe because they are living in such a violent neighborhood they join a gang out of fear. Once we can see that there can be someone just like us in any gang we can see that it's not gangs that are bad, it's violent individuals in gangs that commit the violent crimes. Perhaps we could have more success fighting violent crime if we just faught violent crime instead of fighting entire groups, gangs, etc and treating every member as a violent criminal. The average drug dealer, does not support the murderer in their community anymore than you would. The average thief does not support the murderer. The non-violent criminals are not in some sorta suicidal alliance with the violent criminals, it's more that the non-violent criminals fear both the violent criminal, and the police, and they side with the violent criminal because they know the violent criminal better than they know the police. Maybe if there were better community policing, and maybe if there were better communication between kids in the hood, or ghetto, or gangsters with the outside world, this wouldnt be such a problem.
Why are there no websites on gangs from a gangsters perspective? It's nothing like those rap videos. Perhaps it is due to the code of silence, as all mafias have a code of silence, but in any case even with a code of silence, without any form of communication to the outside world, those who are inside this world are trapped.
The simple way to deal with violent crime is to track people who commit violent offenses or who are carrying a gun. If someone is a gang member, and we can see they carry a gun using advanced surveillance technology, we can track just these gun carrying persons. If someone is known to get into lots of fights and commit assaults we can track people with this criminal history. The violent criminal database would solve this problem. what do you think?
mythbusters examined water torture.. it is real torture if youre strapped down or confined while you were dripped on..
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Duh, we're talking about drowning people to make them talk (waterboarding), not "stacking some people naked, or making them wear panties on their heads".
And if you didn't notice that some people were beaten to death in Abu Ghraib maybe you need get an ear and eye test.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
If you dont agree with the boss and speak out against him ( or the company ), you can/should be fired
Gosh, I am so happy I don't work in the same place as you. That might be partly because I wouldn't.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
Um, no. It's NOT that simple.
The CIA is part of the US Government. The US Government is supposed to work for the people of the United States.
When the "bosses" in government fail in their duties (as is currently occurring in the United States Government) it is the responsibility of those in a position to do so to go over the heads of their direct "bosses" to their real bosses - the people.
When you fell for the Fear Card, and gave up Due Process, and tortured your very first prisoner to death, you became EXACTLY as Evil as any Nazi was.
The ONLY differences being the methods and bodycount (so far.)
Do you think to the VICTIM it matters one bit if it's one, or 12 million?
Technology -- No Place For Wimps! Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Chatroom -- http://www.wemissjerry.org