Have you ever considered going into politics? Making it into an issue of the individual soldier's life against a terrorist's was good, and bringing in the soldier's family was even better. That allowed you to side-step the issue of what orders the soldier had from his superiors.
As I see it, it's not the individual soldier who should be blamed, but the superiors and politicians who put that soldier in Pakistan in the first place. As (among others) Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib have shown, the US military believes it has the right to lie to the public to get support for their operations. We simply don't know if the US special ops team was sent there with orders to apprehend Bin Laden if possible, or to kill him regardless.
US officials said Osama resisted and was shot in the head during the raid that took less than 40 minutes. A US official said the strike team had orders to kill Osama and not capture him but added: “If he had waved a white flag, he would have been taken alive.”
When your allies are working against you, why should we treat them any better than enemies?
You define "working against us" as "not doing what we tell them". It's a quick and efficient way to make friends into enemies.
Actually, this is how the world works, with nations looking out for their own best interests. Being friendly and politically correct with everyone is not how the world works, and I'm glad nobody so deluded is in charge of the US government.
True, that's how it works - for the USA. Other nations have to be friendly and politically correct, or face the consequences. The USA is the only nation which can send their troops into foreign territory to apprehend someone and get away with it, because of its superior military force and large economic influence.
It only works up to a point, though. I think the USA is heading for two big problems down the road:
1. Accumulating enemies and bad-will across the world. The USA may be militarily stronger than any other nation on Earth, but they're not stronger than all the others combined. 2. A large and growing national debt. The USA has the largest military budget in the world, several times larger than the closest contender, and sooner or later they'll reach a point where they can't afford it.
The link you provide is apparently based solely on the federal indictments - that is, a matter of criminal law. More details here.
Um, the second of these links only mentions the killing of two German nationals, illegal possession of firearms, and the bombings against the African embassies. The 9/11 attacks are conspicuously absent.
The first link is a news recap which claims that "Intelligence agencies quickly learned that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by bin Laden’s terrorist organization", but that's hardly conclusive proof, and it's not a formal arrest warrant.
I'm not sure what your point is - do you mean that the FBI was not allowed to put out a warrant for the 9/11 attacks once it became a matter for the military?
If we're talking about rules, a war on an abstract concept is not a real war. A war is an armed conflict between states. The rules of war become meaningless when you're fighting an abstract concept. Whom are you going to declare war against? How do you know when the war ends and you're obligated to send home the prisoners?
The US government's talk about "war on terror", terrorists who are "enemy combatants", "war zones" in countries they are not at war with, and so on, are nonsense from the perspective of, for example, the Geneva convention. It's just rhetorics to make the armed conflict more palatable to the public.
For example, the US government calls it "terrorism" when they want to justify holding people prisoners indfeinitely and torturing them, then "war" when they want to justify holding them without trial, invading other countries, and justify endangering innocent bystanders.
Basically, the US does what it damn well pleases, because nobody else has the military to stand up to them.
Nobody forced the US military to go in there in the first place. They could have worked through the Pakistan government, or accepted that Bin Laden was out of reach for now.
It could have meant a slightly higher risk to US citizens, but that's how the world works. You don't always get to do what you feel is necessary.
Well, we're not sure yet if the special ops team had to shoot Bin Laden for their own safety, or if they were sent there to assassinate him in the first place. So far, the media reports have been contradictory.
I'm one of those foreigners who're a little worried about what USA will do next in the name of "justice".
Wikileaks has exposed corruption in my own government, is perfectly legal, and is basically doing the job our newspaper journalists should do, so I want to support them. But according to the logic of many Americans, anyone who indirectly helps their enemies is also an enemy. If I donate money to Wikileaks, will I also be put on the list for "supporting terrorists"? Will the US government try to seize my foreign assets and arrest me if I put my foot on US soil?
The truth is that the only function of a trial is to ascertain guilt or innocence. The punishment is the part that brings about justice, and when there can be no doubt of guilt, there is no particular need for a trial.
There are a number of reasons there should always be a trial:
1. People are "certain" of someone's guilt and turn out to be wrong all the time. Osama Bin Laden is actually a good example of this. Everybody's assuming he's behind the 9/11 bombings, but there wasn't enough evidence for FBI to put out an arrest warrant. Until his death, Obama was formally only wanted for the bombings against the US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. (FBI Most Wanted) The video released shortly after the 9/11 bombings, where he allegedly took the blame for the attacks, was badly translated. Osama certainly seemd to applaud the bombings after the fact, but it's not clear what part, if any, he took in actutally perpetrating them. The Guantanamo prisoners are another example. American politicians assured us they were "the worst of the worst", and now it turns out some of them weren't even held because they were suspected of terrorism; they were held only because the US military wanted information from them.
2. Allowing assassinations without trial provides the people in power with a convenient way to do away with their political enemies, as long as they can whip up a public frenzy against them. This can and will be abused.
3. A trial lets all the facts on the table. Perhaps Osama is guilty, but not of what he is accused of. Perhaps there are more guilty parties, but the people in power wants some of them to go free. Executing someone without trial is a convenient way to punish your guilty enemy, while letting your guilty friends get away. In this particular case, embarassing facts that may surface during a trial include a) Incompetence on the part of Homeland Security b) Facts regarding the close ties between the Bush family and the Bin Laden family c) The US government's previous support to the terrorists they are now fighting ... plus everything else which has been going on behind the scenes and we don't know about yet.
4. Legality. If we start making exceptions to the law when someone is "obviously guilty", people will start abusing it for their own ends, or simply do it out of laziness, and point to the previous cases as justification. The only way to avoid this is to err on the side of caution and always follow the law, even when someone IS obviously guilty.
I agree, I mean taking credit for 3,000+ deaths in one swoop who were also unarmed should give him the right to a fair trial
Actually, Osama never took credit for those deaths, which is why he wasn't formally wanted by FBI for the 9/11 bombings (FBI most wanted). The video which was shown on television shortly after the bombings, where he allegedly took the blame, was badly translated.
Personally, I'm not entirely sure if Osama had his hand in the 9/11 bombings, or if other people did it inspired by him
P.S. Trying to treat your brother's symptoms (swollen lympth nodes) without understanding the underlying reason (Hodgkin's lymphoma), would probably not have helped.
I'm sorry for your loss, but it sounds like your brother was misdiagnosed. The article is not arguing that symptoms shouldn't be thoroughly investigated. It's talking about the situation where the doctor already knows the reason for the patient's symptoms, and they're not really dangerous or bothering the patient, but the doctor chooses to treat them anyway.
Study after study shows people with access to more health care live longer.
The key word being "access".
"Access" means you can get health care if you need it. It doesn't mean you get healthier the more health care you receive. If you try to treat more and more of a patient's symptoms, no matter how insignificant they are, you'll eventually reach a point where the side effects are worse than the symptoms you're trying to cure.
Traffic data (who calls whom) is automatically collected from the phone network, but you can't process the contents of the calls automatically, at least not very efficiently. With Facebook messages, likes/dislikes, etc, you can also scan the contents of the messages.
Still, you've got a point that collecting telephone traffic data is probably more dangerous.
Facebook collects all that information, and more, in one place where the government can conveniently access it. While you could theoretically collect all that information using an army of civil servants monitoring people's phone calls, e-mails, bank records, and so on, and entering them into databases, social networking sites makes it possible in practice.
Of course the government can get the same information through other means if they target one person specifically. It's the scale of the surveillance which makes it dangerous. A government which can scare 100 million people into submission is more dangerous than one which can scare 1 million people.
Ok, how about this specific: About five years ago, it was revealed that the National Security Agency had a massive database containing hundreds of millions of phone calls. Not from terrorists, not from suspects, but from tens of millons of ordinary American citizens. Why would the NSA go to all the trouble of doing this - illegally, I might add - if they didn't think they could glean useful data from it? (USA Today)
Another specific: In the former communist states (the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc) the government systematically eavesdropped on people's phone calls. This had the effect of scaring people into submission (you could never feel safe saying or doing something critical against the government). It is estimated that in the DDR (Eastern Germany), about half the population were informants, i.e spied on their family, friends or neighbours for the government. And yet, even the Soviet government needed an excuse before they imprisoned someone - they couldn't just send someone off to work camp without a trial. Supposedly treasonous comments picked up during conversations were one way of providing such excuses.
I think you're wrong in assuming you can avoid incrimination by being careful with what you say. There is one piece of advice lawyers give their clients over and over again: Don't talk to the police. You may think nothing can go wrong if you're innocent, you may think you're smarter than the police, you may think your statements are completely innocuous, but it doesn't help. What you say will be misunderstood, taken out of context or simply misheard, as many regretful suspects can testify to. Even a simple and innocuous statement like, "Sure, I didn't like the guy, but I wouldn't kill him!" can and will be used against you ("I remember hearing the suspect say he didn't like the victim").
Don't forget that Facebook also has logs of how many messages you send to people, if you appear in the same photos as them, if you share many interests, and so on. With statistics, you can single out the most likely candidates.
This may not be efficient against terrorism, since it's so extremely rare. For example, if the error rate is as little 0,1% (one in a thousand), and one in ten million people is a terrorist, it means you will still get ten thousand false positives for every true positive.
However, it can be very efficient against more common crimes, or to single out dissidents.
That man has my gratitude for exposing some of my own government's corruption.
Also, I highly doubt the leaked documents have caused any significant danger to American, Brittish or Australian soldiers.
If your government doesn't want its secret information leaked, it shouldn't try to cover up its mistakes in the first place. Actions have consequences.
The problem is that we're all pretty weak-minded when we don't have a firm opinion on something and don't know we're being manipulated. If psychology should teach us anything, it's that people are far from rational.
And even if I were the epitome of self-control and rationality, I'd still suffer if a shady government got control over the dumb masses around me.
Intelligence agencies do, however, map out social networks to see who knows whom. You can do amazing things with statistics - each fact is not suspicious in itself, but combined, they can give a high probability that your'e involved with something. Or so the intelligence agencies believe. Why did they illegally obtain the telephone companies' calling data (who called whom) for more than 200 million American citizens a few years ago, if they didn't think it was useful?
The 4th Amendment works fairly well at keeping the government from doing "fishing expeditions" and I don't have a problem with the government getting access to data if they have a warrant based on probable cause.
There are still many problems. For example, someone within the government can find out something about you under the table, then invent a probable cause to subpoena admissible evidence.
There are also many things which can't convict you, but can be successfully used in smear campaigns. I see you have a Rand quote in your signature. There's an example of the above in Atlas Shrugged, when the government pressures Reardon into giving up his company by threatening to expose his relationship with Dagny Taggart.
There's also the problem with mining publicly available information so deeply that you can incriminate someone for something they didn't do with circumstantial evidence. With enough effort, anyone can be made to look guilty. Having vast amounts of information to mine lowers the bar and makes it cheaper and easier to do it to more people.
There's also the problem that everyone is guilty of something. The government can scare people into submission by selectively enforcing the law - if you're a troublemaker, they scrutinise you until they find something you're guilty of, but if you stay quiet, you get away.
Also, having access to vast information about people helps the people in power to know *whom* they should target in the first place.
Revealing secrets to other nations is kind of unavoidable if you want the public to know about them.
I'm sure Wikileaks would be happy to publish secret papers from China if someone mailed them to them. They're not actually breaking into government installations themselves -- they're depending on what other people send to them.
The women weren't even sure themselves they had been raped. They went to the police to "consult", not to file a report, and the prosecutor decided to warrant an arrest based on their story. Incidentally, the prosecutor happened to know one of the women since before.
The arrest warrant was subsequently thrown out by a second prosecutor, and then reinstated by a third.
Also note that the women admit the sex was consensual. One of them accuses Assange of breaking the condom during consensual sex, and the other one accuses Assange of molesting her while she was sleeping in the same bed as him after the consensual sex.
And, yes, even Swedish lawyers think the allegations are ridiculous.
Slashdot Mirror
*clap* *clap* *clap*
Have you ever considered going into politics? Making it into an issue of the individual soldier's life against a terrorist's was good, and bringing in the soldier's family was even better. That allowed you to side-step the issue of what orders the soldier had from his superiors.
As I see it, it's not the individual soldier who should be blamed, but the superiors and politicians who put that soldier in Pakistan in the first place. As (among others) Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib have shown, the US military believes it has the right to lie to the public to get support for their operations. We simply don't know if the US special ops team was sent there with orders to apprehend Bin Laden if possible, or to kill him regardless.
For example, The Telegraph claims:
US officials said Osama resisted and was shot in the head during the raid that took less than 40 minutes. A US official said the strike team had orders to kill Osama and not capture him but added: “If he had waved a white flag, he would have been taken alive.”
You mean like in civil war?
When your allies are working against you, why should we treat them any better than enemies?
You define "working against us" as "not doing what we tell them". It's a quick and efficient way to make friends into enemies.
Actually, this is how the world works, with nations looking out for their own best interests. Being friendly and politically correct with everyone is not how the world works, and I'm glad nobody so deluded is in charge of the US government.
True, that's how it works - for the USA. Other nations have to be friendly and politically correct, or face the consequences. The USA is the only nation which can send their troops into foreign territory to apprehend someone and get away with it, because of its superior military force and large economic influence.
It only works up to a point, though. I think the USA is heading for two big problems down the road:
1. Accumulating enemies and bad-will across the world. The USA may be militarily stronger than any other nation on Earth, but they're not stronger than all the others combined.
2. A large and growing national debt. The USA has the largest military budget in the world, several times larger than the closest contender, and sooner or later they'll reach a point where they can't afford it.
:-)
And maybe you should try another page:
Bin Laden was a suspect in a number of terrorist attacks around the world in addition to the 9/11 attacks.
The link you provide is apparently based solely on the federal indictments - that is, a matter of criminal law. More details here.
Um, the second of these links only mentions the killing of two German nationals, illegal possession of firearms, and the bombings against the African embassies. The 9/11 attacks are conspicuously absent.
The first link is a news recap which claims that "Intelligence agencies quickly learned that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by bin Laden’s terrorist organization", but that's hardly conclusive proof, and it's not a formal arrest warrant.
I'm not sure what your point is - do you mean that the FBI was not allowed to put out a warrant for the 9/11 attacks once it became a matter for the military?
I'll check your other links later.
If we're talking about rules, a war on an abstract concept is not a real war. A war is an armed conflict between states. The rules of war become meaningless when you're fighting an abstract concept. Whom are you going to declare war against? How do you know when the war ends and you're obligated to send home the prisoners?
The US government's talk about "war on terror", terrorists who are "enemy combatants", "war zones" in countries they are not at war with, and so on, are nonsense from the perspective of, for example, the Geneva convention. It's just rhetorics to make the armed conflict more palatable to the public.
For example, the US government calls it "terrorism" when they want to justify holding people prisoners indfeinitely and torturing them, then "war" when they want to justify holding them without trial, invading other countries, and justify endangering innocent bystanders.
Basically, the US does what it damn well pleases, because nobody else has the military to stand up to them.
Nobody forced the US military to go in there in the first place. They could have worked through the Pakistan government, or accepted that Bin Laden was out of reach for now.
It could have meant a slightly higher risk to US citizens, but that's how the world works. You don't always get to do what you feel is necessary.
Well, we're not sure yet if the special ops team had to shoot Bin Laden for their own safety, or if they were sent there to assassinate him in the first place. So far, the media reports have been contradictory.
I'm one of those foreigners who're a little worried about what USA will do next in the name of "justice".
Wikileaks has exposed corruption in my own government, is perfectly legal, and is basically doing the job our newspaper journalists should do, so I want to support them. But according to the logic of many Americans, anyone who indirectly helps their enemies is also an enemy. If I donate money to Wikileaks, will I also be put on the list for "supporting terrorists"? Will the US government try to seize my foreign assets and arrest me if I put my foot on US soil?
The truth is that the only function of a trial is to ascertain guilt or innocence. The punishment is the part that brings about justice, and when there can be no doubt of guilt, there is no particular need for a trial.
There are a number of reasons there should always be a trial:
1. People are "certain" of someone's guilt and turn out to be wrong all the time.
Osama Bin Laden is actually a good example of this. Everybody's assuming he's behind the 9/11 bombings, but there wasn't enough evidence for FBI to put out an arrest warrant. Until his death, Obama was formally only wanted for the bombings against the US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. (FBI Most Wanted)
The video released shortly after the 9/11 bombings, where he allegedly took the blame for the attacks, was badly translated. Osama certainly seemd to applaud the bombings after the fact, but it's not clear what part, if any, he took in actutally perpetrating them.
The Guantanamo prisoners are another example. American politicians assured us they were "the worst of the worst", and now it turns out some of them weren't even held because they were suspected of terrorism; they were held only because the US military wanted information from them.
2. Allowing assassinations without trial provides the people in power with a convenient way to do away with their political enemies, as long as they can whip up a public frenzy against them. This can and will be abused.
3. A trial lets all the facts on the table.
... plus everything else which has been going on behind the scenes and we don't know about yet.
Perhaps Osama is guilty, but not of what he is accused of. Perhaps there are more guilty parties, but the people in power wants some of them to go free. Executing someone without trial is a convenient way to punish your guilty enemy, while letting your guilty friends get away.
In this particular case, embarassing facts that may surface during a trial include
a) Incompetence on the part of Homeland Security
b) Facts regarding the close ties between the Bush family and the Bin Laden family
c) The US government's previous support to the terrorists they are now fighting
4. Legality. If we start making exceptions to the law when someone is "obviously guilty", people will start abusing it for their own ends, or simply do it out of laziness, and point to the previous cases as justification. The only way to avoid this is to err on the side of caution and always follow the law, even when someone IS obviously guilty.
I agree, I mean taking credit for 3,000+ deaths in one swoop who were also unarmed should give him the right to a fair trial
Actually, Osama never took credit for those deaths, which is why he wasn't formally wanted by FBI for the 9/11 bombings (FBI most wanted). The video which was shown on television shortly after the bombings, where he allegedly took the blame, was badly translated.
Personally, I'm not entirely sure if Osama had his hand in the 9/11 bombings, or if other people did it inspired by him
P.S. Trying to treat your brother's symptoms (swollen lympth nodes) without understanding the underlying reason (Hodgkin's lymphoma), would probably not have helped.
I'm sorry for your loss, but it sounds like your brother was misdiagnosed. The article is not arguing that symptoms shouldn't be thoroughly investigated. It's talking about the situation where the doctor already knows the reason for the patient's symptoms, and they're not really dangerous or bothering the patient, but the doctor chooses to treat them anyway.
Study after study shows people with access to more health care live longer.
The key word being "access".
"Access" means you can get health care if you need it. It doesn't mean you get healthier the more health care you receive. If you try to treat more and more of a patient's symptoms, no matter how insignificant they are, you'll eventually reach a point where the side effects are worse than the symptoms you're trying to cure.
Traffic data (who calls whom) is automatically collected from the phone network, but you can't process the contents of the calls automatically, at least not very efficiently. With Facebook messages, likes/dislikes, etc, you can also scan the contents of the messages.
Still, you've got a point that collecting telephone traffic data is probably more dangerous.
Facebook collects all that information, and more, in one place where the government can conveniently access it. While you could theoretically collect all that information using an army of civil servants monitoring people's phone calls, e-mails, bank records, and so on, and entering them into databases, social networking sites makes it possible in practice.
Of course the government can get the same information through other means if they target one person specifically. It's the scale of the surveillance which makes it dangerous. A government which can scare 100 million people into submission is more dangerous than one which can scare 1 million people.
Point taken.
Ok, how about this specific: About five years ago, it was revealed that the National Security Agency had a massive database containing hundreds of millions of phone calls. Not from terrorists, not from suspects, but from tens of millons of ordinary American citizens. Why would the NSA go to all the trouble of doing this - illegally, I might add - if they didn't think they could glean useful data from it? (USA Today)
Another specific: In the former communist states (the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc) the government systematically eavesdropped on people's phone calls. This had the effect of scaring people into submission (you could never feel safe saying or doing something critical against the government). It is estimated that in the DDR (Eastern Germany), about half the population were informants, i.e spied on their family, friends or neighbours for the government.
And yet, even the Soviet government needed an excuse before they imprisoned someone - they couldn't just send someone off to work camp without a trial. Supposedly treasonous comments picked up during conversations were one way of providing such excuses.
I think you're wrong in assuming you can avoid incrimination by being careful with what you say. There is one piece of advice lawyers give their clients over and over again: Don't talk to the police. You may think nothing can go wrong if you're innocent, you may think you're smarter than the police, you may think your statements are completely innocuous, but it doesn't help. What you say will be misunderstood, taken out of context or simply misheard, as many regretful suspects can testify to. Even a simple and innocuous statement like, "Sure, I didn't like the guy, but I wouldn't kill him!" can and will be used against you ("I remember hearing the suspect say he didn't like the victim").
Don't forget that Facebook also has logs of how many messages you send to people, if you appear in the same photos as them, if you share many interests, and so on. With statistics, you can single out the most likely candidates.
This may not be efficient against terrorism, since it's so extremely rare. For example, if the error rate is as little 0,1% (one in a thousand), and one in ten million people is a terrorist, it means you will still get ten thousand false positives for every true positive.
However, it can be very efficient against more common crimes, or to single out dissidents.
That man has my gratitude for exposing some of my own government's corruption.
Also, I highly doubt the leaked documents have caused any significant danger to American, Brittish or Australian soldiers.
If your government doesn't want its secret information leaked, it shouldn't try to cover up its mistakes in the first place. Actions have consequences.
The problem is that we're all pretty weak-minded when we don't have a firm opinion on something and don't know we're being manipulated. If psychology should teach us anything, it's that people are far from rational.
And even if I were the epitome of self-control and rationality, I'd still suffer if a shady government got control over the dumb masses around me.
It is, however, spying if Facebook hands over the data to a government agency without your knowledge or consent.
Intelligence agencies do, however, map out social networks to see who knows whom. You can do amazing things with statistics - each fact is not suspicious in itself, but combined, they can give a high probability that your'e involved with something. Or so the intelligence agencies believe. Why did they illegally obtain the telephone companies' calling data (who called whom) for more than 200 million American citizens a few years ago, if they didn't think it was useful?
The 4th Amendment works fairly well at keeping the government from doing "fishing expeditions" and I don't have a problem with the government getting access to data if they have a warrant based on probable cause.
There are still many problems. For example, someone within the government can find out something about you under the table, then invent a probable cause to subpoena admissible evidence.
There are also many things which can't convict you, but can be successfully used in smear campaigns. I see you have a Rand quote in your signature. There's an example of the above in Atlas Shrugged, when the government pressures Reardon into giving up his company by threatening to expose his relationship with Dagny Taggart.
There's also the problem with mining publicly available information so deeply that you can incriminate someone for something they didn't do with circumstantial evidence. With enough effort, anyone can be made to look guilty. Having vast amounts of information to mine lowers the bar and makes it cheaper and easier to do it to more people.
There's also the problem that everyone is guilty of something. The government can scare people into submission by selectively enforcing the law - if you're a troublemaker, they scrutinise you until they find something you're guilty of, but if you stay quiet, you get away.
Also, having access to vast information about people helps the people in power to know *whom* they should target in the first place.
Revealing secrets to other nations is kind of unavoidable if you want the public to know about them.
I'm sure Wikileaks would be happy to publish secret papers from China if someone mailed them to them. They're not actually breaking into government installations themselves -- they're depending on what other people send to them.
The women weren't even sure themselves they had been raped. They went to the police to "consult", not to file a report, and the prosecutor decided to warrant an arrest based on their story. Incidentally, the prosecutor happened to know one of the women since before.
The arrest warrant was subsequently thrown out by a second prosecutor, and then reinstated by a third.
Also note that the women admit the sex was consensual. One of them accuses Assange of breaking the condom during consensual sex, and the other one accuses Assange of molesting her while she was sleeping in the same bed as him after the consensual sex.
And, yes, even Swedish lawyers think the allegations are ridiculous.