The article claims that the torture box ("confinement box") is the worst torture, but some 20 years ago we had the same with waterboarding. I see a repeat of older patterns here. I wonder what those who torture other people think.
the US is not a democracy.
Also, it is not a "repeat of old patterns" but continuation of things that have never been solved.
Since when? You probably think that it has been a democracy at some point. And I'm sure the US did use torture at the time you deemed it a democracy.
Hence I don't get your point.
The colloquial, broad sense of “democracy” is also how political scientists employ the term in most contexts. That is: the people who study this for a living are entirely OK with that usage. If they didn’t use that sense of the word they’d need another one to mean the same thing, because it’s very useful.
it's not a democracy, when a large part of the population is barred from voting, and / or if your idea of a vote is giving power to legal persons more than to natural persons during the voting process.
but fine, let me rephrase, the US is not more a democracy than China, North Korea, Russia, or any other clown state that says "wE aRe dEmoCraCy". Having large swathes of your mostly illiterate and poverty-stricken population so badly brainwashed that they fly their flag in their personal LinkedIn Profile, or pride themselves as "patriots" with a red cap, does not make the country "democratic".
To put it even more bluntly: the way the US sees its population in Appalachia is how the rest of the world views the US.
On the upside it all makes great entertainment (see Sacha Baron Cohen's "Who is America" which first and foremost is a documentary and only secondly is Satire).
Also the great entertainment has been declining in quality, and it was always funded directly by the U.S. Government and Military to support their ideologies and agendas abroad. The Koreans are recently doing this to great success, and possibly China as well.
Anyway I don't like the article's take. It seems to blame this on an institutional drift into sadism. I don't think it's the full story, there must be a strategy behind it.
Inducing trauma so that migrants don't ever think about coming back? Maybe coupled with Palantir machine learning insights to identify those who need/respond to this treatment?
>Well, if we did this to these Terrorists there, why not to these other Criminals here…
Simplistic. These guys are part of a hierarchy.
>"EVERYTHING WE SAY, they can see." The end result of mass surveillance is mass murder.
Well no it's meant for targeted murder.
>You should not oppose this simply because it is coming, at some point in the future, for you. You should oppose this because it is happening to anyone. But it is coming for you.
Is it coming or not?
I read an account of a fifteenth-century woman (IIRC) who had essentially been waterboarded, among other tortures. She testified that the waterboarding was by far the worst thing she endured, and would rather die than experience it again.
The articles wants to make you think the box is a 3d confinement reminiscent of the drawing.
From the description it sounds like it is a 4 square foot cage that the person stands in while cuffed.
Yes it’s bad.
No, it’s not like the box mentioned at the CIA Black site.
> The four men interviewed by Amnesty International, as well as Florida-based organizations, told the organization about the ‘box’, described as a 2x2 foot cage-like structure located outside in the yard of “Alligator Alcatraz” where individuals are sent for punishment. Individuals are put in the ‘box’, their hands are shackled and their feet are attached to restraints on the ground. They are unable to sit down or move positions, and are forced to remain there for hours in the heat with hardly any water or protection from the sun, heat and insects. According to a man seeking safety, “People ended up in the ‘box’ just for asking the guards for anything. I saw a guy who was put in it for an entire day.”
> A "2x2 cage-like structure… [an] extremely small space that prevents sitting, lying or changing position" has dimensions startlingly reminiscent of those the Senate documented in the black sites. The major difference is that in Florida, the Small Box is exposed to the elements and constructed as a barred cage, whereas in Catseye, it was a closed structure inside the larger closed structure of the black site. And in Florida, the box is used as punishment. According to one of the Alligator Alcatraz survivors in the Amnesty report, people were put into the box simply for alerting the guards to someone's need for medication. "They were taken to 'the box' and punished for trying to help me," the person told Amnesty
I haven’t drawn this, but I think taller adult would always be touching at least two walls unless standing diagonally.
Traubenfuchs•2mo ago
4gotunameagain•2mo ago
The free rein of the CIA and associated atrocities have been the same under every US president.
noja•2mo ago
linschn•2mo ago
- van buren https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Cass
- Wilson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_German_Americans
- Bush https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_Bay_detention_camp
And i must forget a lot of others, but I think you get the gist. "Great again" indeed.
drcongo•1mo ago
salawat•1mo ago
What I find interesting is the bits we leave out. Like we touch on the Banana Republics, but the annex of Hawaii and how that was skulduggerously done is completely skimmed over.
IAmBroom•1mo ago
There wasn't any German internment. White people got a pass.
drcongo•1mo ago
TrnsltLife•1mo ago
dragonwriter•1mo ago
There was, in fact, but the proportion of German (and Italian, also) nationals and citizens of German (and Italian) descent interned was far lower compared to the population of such foreign nationals and citizens than was the case for Japanese nationals and citizens of Japanese descent.
> White people got a pass.
Relatively speaking, yes, but there still were internments, including of US citizens based on German and Italian descent. (But with more individualized review before internment or eviction from coastal areas than was true of citizens of Japanese descent.)
phantasmish•1mo ago
Ours stopped after (an extremely cursory coverage of) the ‘50s and ‘60 civil rights movement because there was no way to cover Vietnam and Nixon and such basically at all without greatly upsetting Republican parents. Anything newer than ~30 years (at the time) was treated as about as handsome-off as religion. Dunno if that’s changed.
josefritzishere•1mo ago
acdha•2mo ago
Obama’s greatest moral failing was not having war crimes trials. There is a direct line between the Bush-era embrace of torture abroad and the mistreatment we’re now seeing domestically.
1. War Crimes Act of 1996 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Crimes_Act_of_1996
Traubenfuchs•1mo ago
Alligator Alcatraz is a Trump original.
> The free rein of the CIA and associated atrocities have been the same under every US president.
You are absolutely right, but not always is this kind of stuff that directly supported by the president.