Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/09/19/done-in-your-name-survivors-o.html
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And the tiny fingered vulgarian wants to bring all of this back.
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From its start, America didn’t become the best country in the world by doing the right thing, it got to be the best country in the world with lofty rhetoric about the right thing. Doing the right thing was tangential, even counterproductive.
Remember all the great speeches, ignore all things we actually do, and then you’ll truly see how great the greatest country in the world is. If it helps, wave a little American flag.
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This is devastating,
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Are we sure it’s all gone?
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Perhaps the correct venue should be the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court as this venue already has the necessary precautions in place to weigh charges while still respecting the state secrets.
It would take some adjustments to accommodate plaintiffs that are not affiliated with the federal government as state actors, but someone who is seeking redress against such (overzealous) actors who were wholly out of line. It would take some serious integrity and leadership from the top to impose such accountability.
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Good point.
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There’s some stuff in there that is really reminiscent of what was described to me when I visited the Sachenhausen concentration camp.
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Indeed! He wants to re-open Guantanamo and withdraw the pardons Obama issued for Snowden and Chels…
…oh, wait.
Annoying Orange is absolutely not going to fix this, but neither is any candidate that has a chance of winning. To think otherwise is to indulge in pleasant self-deception.
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Thank you especially for the title “done in your name”, as people all too quickly avoid feeling or acting from personal responsibility for the crimes of their own government. Yes, the blame is on you. Remember that when you or somebody else says that the situation is too difficult or dangerous to change. It is difficult and dangerous, but you are already on the hook for it now, it is your civic responsibility.
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Without investigation and prosecution of the guilty, how can we ever trust that it’s over?
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I’m certain it’s not.
If McCain hadn’t chosen Palin as a running mate I would have held my nose and voted for him, because he was the best choice to stop the torture. But I couldn’t stomach having Palin one heart attack away from the Oval Office.
Obama has not stopped it and will not stop it; his administration prosecutes whistleblowers, not torturers.
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I think McCain would have been convinced it was “in the nation’s best interest,” despite his Viet Nam experiences. The military/intelligence/industrial complex would have prevented significant change. And even if he thought he’d stopped it, by executive order or whatever, I wonder if it really would be stopped. Those guys are pretty entrenched it seems to me.
Although I personally don’t think McCain would have folded, that’s a really good point about it continuing on despite his efforts. The US military has a history of deceiving the CinC, after all.
Unfortunately we still don’t know what would happen if a President really tried to stop taxpayer-funded torture, or really tried to punish torturers. 
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Interesting. You have to choose your battles, and I chose mine decades ago, in a different direction. One cannot do everything; it’s a simple fact of life.
This reminds me of the Asimov robot story, Little Lost Robot, in which robots were modified so that the First Law of Robotics, “no robot may injure a human being or through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm,” was changed to omit the second phrase. Of course all of these stories were morality tales, IMO, and this one dealt with the question: “is failure to prevent a terrible deed as bad as doing the terrible deed?” So am I as bad as torturers for failing to prevent the torture? I can see if I were right there, and had the power to immediately stop the torturer, I would be morally obligated. But I do vote, and hope that the candidate I vote for will stop doing this (and lots of other) horrible things. I can’t feel like a bad person for only doing that. Sure there are things in between, like protests, and activism. I’m not built to do that sort of thing (for a number of reasons). So I put my energies into doing something I can do.
So in reply, I can say that I agree it’s our civic responsibity to try to change things. But to say that I am personally responsible for all the terrible actions of my government, I can only disagree.
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Excellent points!
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