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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...
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.
-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..
Make as much noise about torture as possible.
Developers: We can use your help.
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.
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."
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.
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 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.
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.
...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
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.
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 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
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.
But that kind of political climate disappeared a long time ago, so I've never liked this argument.
Voting for the 'lesser of two evils' is still voting for an evil - and you still have every right to complain about what they do. Once, we didn't have to vote for an evil - just a potentially less effective politician. And to be fair, of course there were corrupt politicians in the early days of the US. Just fewer of them, because the education was different, the values were different, and the laws were different.
We are the fire that lights our world.. and we are the fire that consumes it.
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?
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").
Alexis de Tocqueville
http://www.tocqueville.org/chap1.htm
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!!
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?
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