If Obama only pardons one person (hopefully unlikely) Chelsea is by far the correct choice imo. She did a great service to the world and has been horribly mistreated by the prison system for it.
The US wasn't founded to serve as a beacon of prestige. The point of the government has more to do with its obligations to, and relationship with, its people.
But I don't see anything in the documents that showed a government working against its own people. The content of the documents is mostly matter-of-fact (or even sarcastic) analysis of other countries. In a few cases it reveled intelligence sources, for example Lebanese politicians politicians working against the destructive foreign influence in their country - more controversially, I think, there was a US "spy" in the German government. I'm not German, so I have no problem with this. In other cases, for example in South Sudan, it shows the US government working, perhaps clandestinely, to uphold justice and help the people avoid ethnic cleansing.
> The US wasn't founded to serve as a beacon of prestige. The point of the government has more to do with its obligations to, and relationship with, its people.
There's a bit of cognitive dissonance in your claims.
America's prestige was destroyed by none other than George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Bremmer, Rupert Murdoch, Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice and several others, for a number of reasons, but most of all the 2003 invasion of Iraq, from which you can draw a straight line to ISIS.
How you "connect the dots" and manage to wander your way from Manning and land on Trump is beyond me. How you digress from WikiLeaks to Trump is curious.
Political influence may have elected Trump, but cones of silence, echo chambers and hacker mudslinging isn't really what got Trump elected.
Republican incompetence permitted his candidacy in the first place. Republican spite invoking a broad mistrust among suburbanites and rural America put him in office. If the people who voted Trump, are so easily deceived by falsified evidence and dubious non-journalism, then they were stupid enough to be deceived by anything, but wanted to be spiteful and hate something, and would have found something dubious to latch onto and excuse their shitty vote anyway.
I agree with most of your post, certainly the ideological bankruptcy of the GOP left trump the best candidate, and no doubt America's "good guy" image was harmed by Bush. Although as satire of the time ("Team America: World Police"), the USA was certainly not seen as impotent. Just dumb, maybe evil.
>>How you digress from WikiLeaks to Trump is curious.
I think Wikileaks has become the avenue for unilateral anti-US sentiment. For example,. Recent leaks like the DNC emails reinforced a sense of political disenfranchisement that leading to shockingly poor voter turnout. Perhaps most misleading was that the DNC emails were selective, possibly edited for maximum impact. For a similar opinion see Edward Snowden's(!) comments:
There is an information/spin war going on, with the military agencies of countries such as Russia directly participating. Wikileaks was the first shot at the USA, and Manning was a traitor who gave the ammo.
For the sake of argument, let's say that WikiLeaks is anti-US. How does that matter? The US itself is ruining it's reputation by conducting mass surveillance, torture (at least during Bush years), drone assainations, etc. WikiLeaks just happens to be the vehicle for releasing classified information about that. In other words, if the US wasn't doing that then there wouldn't be much "embarrassing" material for WikiLeaks to release.
The first two links you posted don't seem to apply, as far as I know, because the President can only pardon people convicted of federal crimes against the US.
Manning has such an odd personality, it's hard to discern how much is the person and how much is the influence of the extraordinary circumstances swirling around the individual.
The really strange part in all this is whether preventing suicide through incarceration is at all ethical.
What kind of acceptance and support awaits Manning upon being granted freedom? Can a post-pardon suicide be prevented?
You do realize that Obama has tried to find several ways to do this, and has been shut down by the Republicans every time?
Congress ultimately decided to keep Guantanamo, and left zero room to find a single solution; Obama had no choice but to negotiate transfers with other countries (a long and problematic process) while at the same time let the court system handle the remaining cases. Obama could perhaps have tried harder, but he has had a lot of resistance on many fronts from the GOP.
He has almost succeeded at this point, anyway; there are only about 40 prisoners left. [1]
Presidential pardons are corrupt by definition. They transgress the rule of law and equality before it. If you think someone needs a presidential pardon, just back up and think "which law is horrible and unjust and must be reformed." If not the law maybe the courts. Pardon at best is a fig leaf over a gaping wound. At worst, well pick them out yourself - the best you can say about it is that it looks really, really bad.
Pardons can certainly be corrupt, but I don't think they're corrupt by definition. I think of them as a last line of defense-in-depth against unjust convictions. After all, no organization made up of humans can be perfect, and the court system (of any nation) is no exception.
Of course, pardons are misusable. I would support, for example, disallowing presidential pardons in the last year of a presidential term, so that Presidents can't cut and run from the political consequences of their last minute pardons. That could cut down on egregious abuses like Clinton's.
If the conviction is unjust either the law is unjust and should be reformed or the system is unjust in not providing a reasonable, equitable and useful avenue of appeal to overturn the injustice.
Corrupt by definition because it is always a corruption of "equality before the law"
Suppose we abolished presidential pardons. Now, couldn't the exact same argument be used in favor of abolishing the final layer of appeals courts? And then the layer below that?
Keep in mind that many (most?) people consider interrelated checks and balances between the different branches of government to be a good thing. And the system was designed to be biased in favor of false negatives in order to reduce as much as possible the incidents of false positives (wrongful convictions). I consider that a feature, not a bug.
I see the difference, but I don't see how it matters. Pardon's are a legal mechanism. They were built into the system from the very beginning. The fact that they take different factors into account (by design) doesn't somehow make them illegitimate.
You didn't quite explicitly say this, but it sounds to me like you want to make sure every unjustly convicted person suffers as publicly and viscerally as possible in order to drum up the political will for change. (I can't think of any other principled reason to oppose a mechanism to free the innocent victims of an imperfect system.)
I suppose it's easy to feel that way when it's not you or one of your loved ones in that position. To them, it's not just a "fig leaf". It's getting their life back.
The rule of law and equality before it is a principal I believe in. Some politician being able to arbitrarily decide that the rule of law does not apply to a particular person is a violation of that principal.
My apologies if I was misrepresenting your position. I was basing my take on these words:
> If you think someone needs a presidential pardon, just back up and think "which law is horrible and unjust and must be reformed." If not the law maybe the courts. Pardon at best is a fig leaf over a gaping wound.
Maybe you don't like to put it this bluntly, but it seems pretty clear that you were saying "pardoning is never justified, just reform the legal system instead." I saw no consideration in any of your statements for the possibility that some of these unfortunate souls could get some relief in the meantime while the long, hard, and uncertain work of reform is carried out. No, that would be "at best a fig leaf", meaning something covers up a dirty secret, alleviating shame and embarrassment.
If you feel I'm misrepresenting your original argument, I'm willing to listen to an alternative explanation of what you meant. But until one is offered, I stand by what I said. It was a reasonable interpretation of your words as you wrote them.
By the way, you keep describing this as the President "being able to arbitrarily decide that the rule of law does not apply to a particular person". This is an effective rhetorical technique because it conjures up images of corrupt witch hunts, political retribution, secret prisons, and other such nightmarish scenarios encountered in totalitarian distopias. You're leaving out the fact that the politician can only decide this in one direction - toward innocence. It can't be used to punish anybody. It can only be used to delight them. I consider this an example of the Noncentral Fallacy[0].
> Maybe one day you'll see why it matters.
Maybe, rather than putting on an air of dismissive superiority and suggesting that I'm just not wise and experienced enough to see the world the way it really is, you could provide an actual example of how it could matter to me in a negative way.
It's some of A and some of B. Sometimes unjust laws stick around even if the majority of the population thinks they're unjust. Courts are also overburdened with cases and as a result operate very inefficiently. Both of these are caused by our broken political system.
I believe they're an acknowledgement that the system cannot be perfect and some small amount of manual tinkering will always be needed for it to always do what seems right.
You seem to be arguing for a legal system completely without human discretion as humans being able to make decisions is inherently unequal (for example sentencing is different based on time of day). I'm not sure a legal system with no human discretion is tenable, though.
The law always had gaps. By virtue of its written-down-ness. Pardons are for when someone very definitely did break the law, and for all same readings of a sane text they are guilty, but the heart of the people says let them free.
When talking about the short run and long run implications of anything it must be acknowledged that in the long run we're all dead. Furthermore, in the medium term a very large portion of people's lives can be wasted.
Instinctually, I tend towards preferring legalism, and the formation of institutions rather than cults of personality and the types of ad hoc choices that undermine rational preferences in policy decisions.
However, politics are human with outputs often affecting inputs and any number of chaotic dynamics, such that a controlled corruption of some sort might be useful. Especially if the point of political leaders is to lead while environments are in flux, it makes sense that they'd occasionally find someone guilty of a current law not guilty in the context of where the law should be.
Taking a very large step back, it may have been a historic mistake by the President to pardon the large number of Americans who committed torture and ordered people to be torturers. It was unseemly to even consider the type of punishment people meritted for doing what they claimed was work for their country, and possibly as problemmatic to consider the last VP or even President being imprisoned or an even more severe punishment.
On the one hand that likely would have ushered in cycles of political retribution that were violent and vindictive. On the other, the pardons have allowed people to pretend that torture isn't definitively illegal regardless of any claimed justifications.
A trans person other than Chelsea could be reading this right now. If you do not respect her identity then it could be (and should be imo) interpreted as disregard for trans people in general
> It's like telling someone to use Kolkata instead of Calcutta.
No, it's not like that for everyone.
Part of having a civil discussion within a community is understanding and accepting our differences—especially ideological ones. That means recognizing when what you say has the effect of moving us away from our shared goal of gratifying our intellectual curiosity and adjusting accordingly. It might not be possible to succeed in this all of the time, but we have to try, and this is a case with an obvious path forward.
I'm a little disappointed, honestly, because now the original comment that I responded to is still on the parent thread, without any response that suggests that it's not okay to misgender a trans person.
The best use of pardons would be to release thousands of people that have been convicted under the three strikes and your out schemes. Not all will deserve to be released, but someone that used up there last strike with shop lifting or stealing a car does not deserve to be put away for the rest of their life.
46 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 111 ms ] threadThe one sided, anti-us nature of WikiLeaks, including perhaps incomplete content, hint at editorial digression with a clear motivation.
I can't come up with a single way this helped America, but it certainly hurt our prestige around the world.
Its rich people.
America's prestige was destroyed by none other than George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Bremmer, Rupert Murdoch, Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice and several others, for a number of reasons, but most of all the 2003 invasion of Iraq, from which you can draw a straight line to ISIS.
How you "connect the dots" and manage to wander your way from Manning and land on Trump is beyond me. How you digress from WikiLeaks to Trump is curious.
Political influence may have elected Trump, but cones of silence, echo chambers and hacker mudslinging isn't really what got Trump elected.
Republican incompetence permitted his candidacy in the first place. Republican spite invoking a broad mistrust among suburbanites and rural America put him in office. If the people who voted Trump, are so easily deceived by falsified evidence and dubious non-journalism, then they were stupid enough to be deceived by anything, but wanted to be spiteful and hate something, and would have found something dubious to latch onto and excuse their shitty vote anyway.
>>How you digress from WikiLeaks to Trump is curious.
I think Wikileaks has become the avenue for unilateral anti-US sentiment. For example,. Recent leaks like the DNC emails reinforced a sense of political disenfranchisement that leading to shockingly poor voter turnout. Perhaps most misleading was that the DNC emails were selective, possibly edited for maximum impact. For a similar opinion see Edward Snowden's(!) comments:
http://www.politico.com/blogs/under-the-radar/2016/07/edward...
There is an information/spin war going on, with the military agencies of countries such as Russia directly participating. Wikileaks was the first shot at the USA, and Manning was a traitor who gave the ammo.
And mistreated? Perhaps, but not any more, and certainly quite less given the media scrutiny, than any generic prisoner.
There are plenty of more deserving souls out there, people like this -
https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/mom-of-young-man-jail...
https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/5lc9z3/justice_dept_l...
Or intervene on behalf of people who take a deal for the sake of not being able to defend themselves.
http://www.innocenceproject.org
Source: http://www.legalflip.com/Article.aspx?id=61&pageid=321
https://www.chelseamanning.org/learn-more/collateral-murder-...
Manning has such an odd personality, it's hard to discern how much is the person and how much is the influence of the extraordinary circumstances swirling around the individual.
The really strange part in all this is whether preventing suicide through incarceration is at all ethical.
What kind of acceptance and support awaits Manning upon being granted freedom? Can a post-pardon suicide be prevented?
Congress ultimately decided to keep Guantanamo, and left zero room to find a single solution; Obama had no choice but to negotiate transfers with other countries (a long and problematic process) while at the same time let the court system handle the remaining cases. Obama could perhaps have tried harder, but he has had a lot of resistance on many fronts from the GOP.
He has almost succeeded at this point, anyway; there are only about 40 prisoners left. [1]
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/with-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Clinton_pardon_controvers...
Of course, pardons are misusable. I would support, for example, disallowing presidential pardons in the last year of a presidential term, so that Presidents can't cut and run from the political consequences of their last minute pardons. That could cut down on egregious abuses like Clinton's.
Corrupt by definition because it is always a corruption of "equality before the law"
Keep in mind that many (most?) people consider interrelated checks and balances between the different branches of government to be a good thing. And the system was designed to be biased in favor of false negatives in order to reduce as much as possible the incidents of false positives (wrongful convictions). I consider that a feature, not a bug.
Appeal courts rule on law. You see the difference?
You didn't quite explicitly say this, but it sounds to me like you want to make sure every unjustly convicted person suffers as publicly and viscerally as possible in order to drum up the political will for change. (I can't think of any other principled reason to oppose a mechanism to free the innocent victims of an imperfect system.)
I suppose it's easy to feel that way when it's not you or one of your loved ones in that position. To them, it's not just a "fig leaf". It's getting their life back.
The rule of law and equality before it is a principal I believe in. Some politician being able to arbitrarily decide that the rule of law does not apply to a particular person is a violation of that principal.
Maybe one day you'll see why it matters.
> If you think someone needs a presidential pardon, just back up and think "which law is horrible and unjust and must be reformed." If not the law maybe the courts. Pardon at best is a fig leaf over a gaping wound.
Maybe you don't like to put it this bluntly, but it seems pretty clear that you were saying "pardoning is never justified, just reform the legal system instead." I saw no consideration in any of your statements for the possibility that some of these unfortunate souls could get some relief in the meantime while the long, hard, and uncertain work of reform is carried out. No, that would be "at best a fig leaf", meaning something covers up a dirty secret, alleviating shame and embarrassment.
If you feel I'm misrepresenting your original argument, I'm willing to listen to an alternative explanation of what you meant. But until one is offered, I stand by what I said. It was a reasonable interpretation of your words as you wrote them.
By the way, you keep describing this as the President "being able to arbitrarily decide that the rule of law does not apply to a particular person". This is an effective rhetorical technique because it conjures up images of corrupt witch hunts, political retribution, secret prisons, and other such nightmarish scenarios encountered in totalitarian distopias. You're leaving out the fact that the politician can only decide this in one direction - toward innocence. It can't be used to punish anybody. It can only be used to delight them. I consider this an example of the Noncentral Fallacy[0].
> Maybe one day you'll see why it matters.
Maybe, rather than putting on an air of dismissive superiority and suggesting that I'm just not wise and experienced enough to see the world the way it really is, you could provide an actual example of how it could matter to me in a negative way.
[0] http://lesswrong.com/lw/e95/the_noncentral_fallacy_the_worst...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pardon_of_Richard_Nixon
That can affect you in a negative way.
Instinctually, I tend towards preferring legalism, and the formation of institutions rather than cults of personality and the types of ad hoc choices that undermine rational preferences in policy decisions.
However, politics are human with outputs often affecting inputs and any number of chaotic dynamics, such that a controlled corruption of some sort might be useful. Especially if the point of political leaders is to lead while environments are in flux, it makes sense that they'd occasionally find someone guilty of a current law not guilty in the context of where the law should be.
Taking a very large step back, it may have been a historic mistake by the President to pardon the large number of Americans who committed torture and ordered people to be torturers. It was unseemly to even consider the type of punishment people meritted for doing what they claimed was work for their country, and possibly as problemmatic to consider the last VP or even President being imprisoned or an even more severe punishment.
On the one hand that likely would have ushered in cycles of political retribution that were violent and vindictive. On the other, the pardons have allowed people to pretend that torture isn't definitively illegal regardless of any claimed justifications.
A trans person other than Chelsea could be reading this right now. If you do not respect her identity then it could be (and should be imo) interpreted as disregard for trans people in general
No, it's not like that for everyone.
Part of having a civil discussion within a community is understanding and accepting our differences—especially ideological ones. That means recognizing when what you say has the effect of moving us away from our shared goal of gratifying our intellectual curiosity and adjusting accordingly. It might not be possible to succeed in this all of the time, but we have to try, and this is a case with an obvious path forward.