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by GeekyBear 2618 days ago
"Just following orders" has been used as recently as the Obama administration as an excuse not to prosecute CIA operatives for torture, despite American law on the books that explicitly forbids using it as an excuse for torture.
1 comments
rtkwe 2618 days ago
Isn't the main part that they were given legal guidance that what they were doing was not legally torture though? There's a bit in another article that got posted today [0] about that.

> Guantánamo leadership wanted to understand the legal gymnastics that would be required to implement a program of their own. “Torture has been prohibited by international law, but the language of the statutes is written vaguely,”

and

> Bush Administration lawyers had taken the position that “enemy combatants” could be held indefinitely, without trials, and that in order for something to qualify as “torture” it “must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.”

[0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/22/guantanamos-da...

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GeekyBear 2618 days ago
People weren't just tortured, some were tortured to death.

The United States Senate ratified, and President Reagan signed the The U.N. Convention Against Torture, which states that “no exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.”

No amount of legal hand waving by the Bush administration can justify what was done.

Likewise, there is no excuse for the Obama administration refusing to prosecute the crimes that occurred.

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zaphirplane 2618 days ago
Not arguing the moral point. The parent poster said the threshold of the treatment becoming torture wasn’t crossed, you are saying torture is banned by the agreement. It needs to be torture for you point to have standing
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GeekyBear 2618 days ago
How can the treatment of prisoners prove to be fatal without that treatment rising to the level of torture?

As Obama put it, "We tortured some folks."

He just refused to prosecute those guilty of ordering and carrying out that torture, despite our treaty obligation to do so.

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TheOtherHobbes 2617 days ago
Perhaps Obama was "just following orders" himself.
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