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posted by
martyb
on Sunday July 30 2017, @11:28PM
from the Rosenhan-Milgram-Dunning-Kruger-research dept.
from the Rosenhan-Milgram-Dunning-Kruger-research dept.
From Wikileaks (via Vinay Gupta):
Judge rules two psychologists, Mitchell and Jessen, who made millions as consultants for the CIA's torture program can face trial.
How do you get into the business of being a torture consultant? Good question because when they started:
Neither man had ever carried out a real interrogation, had language skills or expertise on al Qaeda - the chief enemy in the war on terror - when the CIA handpicked Mitchell and Jessen to spearhead its supposed intelligence gathering program shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Their psychology backgrounds were in family therapy; their Ph.D. dissertations were on high blood pressure.
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Millionaire CIA Torture Psychologists to Face Trial
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Slowly and surely the unix crept up on the Nintendo user ...
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Monday July 31 2017, @04:41AM (2 children)
Definitely patsies. With military justice tending to be harsh and abrupt, the military boys are very interested in CYA. They'll happily use anyone with a degree or reputation to justify their actions. Dangle big carrots in front of them to tempt them into endorsing whatever idiotic notions they want to act upon. They can also exert a great deal of unfair pressure on uncooperative civilians. You don't want to sign your name on the memo endorsing torture? Say goodbye to your career! But if you just sign here, we can keep you on in a real cushy job, a sinecure.
Seems to me the people who actually did the torturing are the ones most deserving of punishment. This latest event could be another twist in the plot. Now that their asses aren't covered, they will throw the doctors under the bus in a heartbeat, turn them into fall guys.
Look at the history of America's foreign interventions. So many of them were directly contradictory to American values, and caused a great deal of blowback. One such is the Contras of Iran-Contra scandal infamy. Seems many of the military boys think the end justifies the means, and keep digging themselves and all of America in deeper with their reckless shortcuts. F*** diplomacy, just identify the bad guys and shoot them! Or heck, who cares who's bad, shoot them all!
(Score: 2) by driverless on Monday July 31 2017, @09:39AM (1 child)
It depends. These guys have sworn an oath [ucpress.edu] not to do what they were doing. The Oath of Enlistment [army.mil] doesn't prohibit that, and if it weren't for the Nuremberg Trials sort of making that look bad could be seen as condoning the use of torture if so ordered (disclaimer: I'm not a military lawyer so I don't know if there isn't some subclause of a subclause in the Uniform Code of Military Justice somewhere that prohibits it, but on the fact if it it just says obey orders and follow the UCMJ).
(Score: 3, Informative) by Thexalon on Monday July 31 2017, @02:30PM
The UCMJ is actually quite clear on this point: Anyone subject to the UCMJ must obey lawful orders, and must disobey unlawful orders. So, if, say, somebody ordered National Guardsmen to gun down unarmed protesters (to use a completely hypothetical example [wikipedia.org]), the Guardsmen are supposed to disobey that order and could be prosecuted for their actions.
Torture, being illegal under both US and international law, should never be carried out by US military personnel, even if they are ordered to do so. Of course, the odds are approximately zero that any of them will be court-martialed for it.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.