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May. 21st, 2004 03:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
winterbadgerIn another discussion on free speech and who should be called a "terrorist," someone posted (possibly at least somewhat tongue in cheek):
Nope. They're part of our government; if we want them to act differently, we have but to elect officials who will change their policy.
In fact, that's already happened any number of times. Right now, the IRS is getting pilloried for not collecting all the taxes that people owe. This is largely a result of their getting pilloried a few years ago for being much to zealous in collecting taxes. I'm sure this isn't the first time they've gotten whipsawed like this.
I think the tactics the IRS were using before (and probably some of the ones they use now) were/are totally inappropriate, and I wouldn't want them used on me. OTOH, that means some people are going to get away with not paying their fair share.
This led me to this (not entirely directly connected) chain of thought:
In the same way, I think that torturing and humiliating prisoners, whether POWs, terrorists, or "common" crimnals is wrong. I certainly wouldn't want myself or anyone I know or care about to be treated the way the prisoners in Abu Ghraib were being treated (let alone be actually tortured, in the terms that I'm accustomed to thinking of it). On the other hand, I would find it incredibly difficult, if I were a senior commander, to tell an intel interrogation team that they had to limit their information gathering to humane methods if the health and safety of men and women under my command were endangered by my not getting information from prisoners that I held. Writing to tell a family that their son or daughter is dead must be hard enough, but if you've got a voice in the back of your head saying, "Yeah, and if we'd only pushed those prisoners a little bit harder, they might have told us that the enemy knew we were coming and had set up an ambush..."
Some times it can be hard to know what the right choice is; even where you can tell, making that choice must sometimes be almost intolerably hard.
Then we're agreed: the Internal Revenue Service is a terror organization. ...right?
Nope. They're part of our government; if we want them to act differently, we have but to elect officials who will change their policy.
In fact, that's already happened any number of times. Right now, the IRS is getting pilloried for not collecting all the taxes that people owe. This is largely a result of their getting pilloried a few years ago for being much to zealous in collecting taxes. I'm sure this isn't the first time they've gotten whipsawed like this.
I think the tactics the IRS were using before (and probably some of the ones they use now) were/are totally inappropriate, and I wouldn't want them used on me. OTOH, that means some people are going to get away with not paying their fair share.
This led me to this (not entirely directly connected) chain of thought:
In the same way, I think that torturing and humiliating prisoners, whether POWs, terrorists, or "common" crimnals is wrong. I certainly wouldn't want myself or anyone I know or care about to be treated the way the prisoners in Abu Ghraib were being treated (let alone be actually tortured, in the terms that I'm accustomed to thinking of it). On the other hand, I would find it incredibly difficult, if I were a senior commander, to tell an intel interrogation team that they had to limit their information gathering to humane methods if the health and safety of men and women under my command were endangered by my not getting information from prisoners that I held. Writing to tell a family that their son or daughter is dead must be hard enough, but if you've got a voice in the back of your head saying, "Yeah, and if we'd only pushed those prisoners a little bit harder, they might have told us that the enemy knew we were coming and had set up an ambush..."
Some times it can be hard to know what the right choice is; even where you can tell, making that choice must sometimes be almost intolerably hard.
