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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...
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
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.
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.
Dammit, "I don't like this" is not a sufficient reason for violating classification.
Err, yes it is.
Should she have been fired for breaking security? Yes.
Should she have done it anyway? Yes.
This is a classic case for civil disobedience. There come times when following the law violates your own integrity as a person, and the dual virtues of loyalty and compassion conflict. At that point, you must showcase you humanity and be willing to take the punishment for it.
Might I have the strength to choose as wisely.
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.
That's not how clearances work. There are two aspects that must be satisified to allow access to classified material:
1. Clearance. You must have a sufficient clearance level to view the material.
2. Need to Know. You must need to know the information in order to properly carry out your job.
She clearly violated the second part: the need to know. Personally, while I agree that torture is wrong (and useless as an information gathering technique), she didn't need to reveal that she knew about instances of it from secured information. If all she had said was "I think waterboarding is bad" she probably wouldn't have gotten into any trouble. However, she clearly violated the need to know, clearly demonstrating herself to be a potential security risk.
There are rules about how security is handled, and when the US government desides to trust you to follow them, you'd damned better follow them! In this case, American lives may not have been at stake, but make no mistake: there are instances when information is classified because revealing it will endanger Americans and allies, and I'd much rather she follow the rules and disagree with the CIA than decide she can determine when it's OK to break them.
Security in the armed forces and the CIA is not a laughing matter. There are arguably times when it's time to break the rules and reveal terrible things. One of the side effects you must be prepared for, though, is losing your clearance and potentially being arrested and jailed for it. Part of civil disobedience is accepting the consequences of your actions.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
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").
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?