Mozilla Refuses to Drop Domain Seizure Circumvention App

[ZeroAxis]

I'm the bottom paragraph by the way

 

[MrTub]

America doesn't have jurisdiction on the internet, I don't really see how they could legally do this.

They do have it on the sites whose domain is in the US.

But not on, say, TV Shack. The offices are in Sweden and the servers are in Australia. Where is their jurisdiction there?

Not trying to be inflammatory, but this sort of thing seriously irritates me.

I'm no lawyer, but that can't be legal.

International politics is dicey that way. I'd be willing to bet that neither Sweden nor Australia feels like picking a fight with the United States on this issue. If they did though, here's how that would work:
Swedish and Australian diplomats send letters/have meetings with US diplomats to discuss the issue. US says something about it being in their national interest since the companies involved are largely pirating material whose lawful sale would benefit the US. If reported this way to Congress/Senate etc., this could be grounds for less cooperation with Sweden and Australia since such cooperation benefits the US less than it did before. If this costs Sweden and Australia more than what they stand to gain from continuing to pursue their issues, they'll leave it alone.

When you're thinking about international politics, it helps to think in terms of each country as a particularly entitled 11 year old.

What's that? Why yes, it is more depressing when you understand it.

I might be wrong but I'm pretty sure the government of Sweden is only allowed to pull down website if it has child porn or is a mather of national security otherwise it has to go to court.

As I said I might be wrong.

 

[BehattedWanderer]

I forgot that there were lawyers who were willing to be shady for our side. If the domains were seized illegally, then Mozilla has it's point. I do believe those of us in America have a Constitutional protection from just that occurrence.

 

[ZeroAxis]

quoted for truth, AngryMan101. Too many Americans are hopelessly lost to the blind devotion they mistake for patriotism, and the fallacy that is "appeal to authority". I apologize again for messing up my first few posts, and just a reminder, please everyone google "Patriot Act vs. German Enabling Act". The world is different in many ways, but it's also similar in many ways as well.

 

[Numachuka]

If the domains are not in the US, Homeland Security has no jurisdiction over them.

You can say that all you want, but that's not going to stop them if they want something down.

YEAH MAN BECAUSE LIKE AMERICA RULES THE WORLD DUDE THEY CAN DO WHATEVER THEY WANT BECAUSE.... AMERICA!

OT:Even if the remove the addon another will get made and even if there isn't there will be plenty of ways of finding the new domains.

 

[Eri]

If the domains are not in the US, Homeland Security has no jurisdiction over them.

You can say that all you want, but that's not going to stop them if they want something down.

YEAH MAN BECAUSE LIKE AMERICA RULES THE WORLD DUDE THEY CAN DO WHATEVER THEY WANT BECAUSE.... AMERICA!

OT:Even if the remove the addon another will get made and even if there isn't there will be plenty of ways of finding the new domains.

I wasn't even siding with them, just stating. And yeah, America can pretty much do whatever it wants, who's going to stop them? No one. Obviously they wouldn't go crazy but if they did, you couldn't do much.

 

[Therumancer]

[
I appreciate you taking the time to write this. This is the first coherent explanation I've heard from a Patriot Act supporter. It was refreshing.

I still don't agree with a lot of what you said, mostly for moral reasons, but your opinions at least make sense.

I did note a recurring theme of "this is the way it has to be done if we're going to make it". I'm curious to know if the alternative has ever been tried. I know that in the history of our nation, it hasn't. The Patriot Act has better or worse but very similar counterparts for every war, cold or otherwise, we've ever been in.

The other major reason I didn't like the Patriot Act was that the administration at the time was one that I didn't trust with that kind of power, and if the behavior of the Justice Department during that time was any indication, it was a very well placed distrust.

Well, in the end there isn't room for an alternative. In the end when it comes to matters of national security during a war, there is no way you can be 100% positive before apprehending someone. What's more time is typically of the essence, and while during peacetime you have the luxury of taking weeks, months, or even years to find answers, in a war you don't when the fate of a nation of millions could be decided based on a bit of information right now.

Most people who argue morality do so from the comfortable position of peace time, and not being the ones in the hot seat. To most people the threat isn't real enough for them to be a serious question when they ponder lofty issues like human rights.

The US has more or less acknowleged the situation by drafting two entire sets of rules, one for times of peace, one for times of crisis.

The Patriot Act arguably is an attempt to try an alternative, and it hasn't worked out all that wonderfully. Rather than allowing people to have a high degree of freedom during a time of crisis, what it's done is pit the peacetime authorities and standards against those of war time. We've spent tons of time bickering over the rights of the people being brought into custody, and things like Gitmo, because we permitted that level of freedom of speech to remain, rather than the civilians just doing their own thing, and the goverment being given the free hand to do what it needs without a big deal being made about it.

Most cultures that operated on a large scale that didn't have martial law, or a practical version of it, wound up falling as a result. While it wasn't the exclusive cause of Rome's fall, one of it's problems was that the Romans became convinced of their nessecity to the entire world, due to people being dependant on them for trade, and to maintain the roads. As a result they wound up seriously reducing the power of their armies, and placing them away from the major cities so they wouldn't get under foot. The old saying "Barbarians At The Gates" comes from the Romans literally ignoring massing threats about them, due to being convinced of their own invincibility, and not wanting to deal with the troubles a war would entail. As some historians have pointed out, had Rome decided to invoke martial law, go on a war time footing, and bring it's armies to more strategically viable positions, it probably wouldn't have fallen. Of course the reasons why they didn't do these things are hardly simple when viewed from their perspective.

A lot of people draw parallels between the US and Rome nowadays because of some similar mentalities, even if a lot of the specifics are differant. One of the areas we're similar on is our focus on morality, as opposed to practicality.

Basically without martial law, your not going to have the abillity to easily move troops around because nobody wants the troops in their back yard, what's more since nobody wants to die (or see their kids die), you need to have the goverment in control firmly enough to institute and enforce a draft to gain as many troops as possible, then you need to be able to ensure all the resources your country can muster are put towards the war, which of course people who want their stuff are going to object to. During all of this you need to maintain control, so you can't have people exercising their freedom of speech to rant and rave and try and cause resistance to your "tyranny" even if it's for their good. Such things exist because time has shown that all of these problems and more will occur without tight controls.

With The Patriot Act, we kind of figured we had enough people in our reserves where we didn't need a draft, we also had enough resources where we didn't need to muster every bit of scrap metal we could for the war effort. Our enemy simply not being the kind of threat where we feared imminant invasion, our big concern being mostly one of internal security to stop terrorist strikes. We kind of figured we could thus get by mostly by taking the parts of martial law dealing with internal security, and let the civilians otherwise go on doing their thing, but it didn't work out that way.

If you look at say "World War II" and things like it's propaganda, you'll notice that in addition to the "give them both barrels" posters with the factory worker and soldier standing side by side, and the picture of an malevolently shadowed german helmet peering over a wall and the caption "He's watching you", and of course "Loose Lips Sink Ships" (which had apparently been used before this conflict), we also had posters of happy housewives packing away all their preserves to send to uncle sam, or making do with one spoon instead of the four differant sized ones they kept to cook (the others being sent to the war effort), or kids lining up to hand over their toys to be melted down for the war effort... etc... This kind of thing worked largely because the goverment had the abillity to produce this kind of material, while preventing the anti-war movement from basically saying "hey, go to hell, we want to keep our own stuff" or whatever. Those guys were out there, it's just a dissenting word could get someone jailed, because again, the big picture mandated that we literally throw everything we have into the war. The Middle East does not represent that kind of threat, if we go to war with China though... well that might be a differant story. As it was we almost lost World War II, if we hadn't instituted war powers, it's doubtful we would ever have produced the materials or manpower to be the factor that we were.

At any rate, I'm rambling and pretty much saying the same things. The basic point is that The Patriot Act *IS* the attempt to do things a differant way. It's arguably failed. We spend all our time bickering over the morality of arresting the people we round up using it, the anti-war elements are constantly underfoot, and just about anything that can be spun to justify pulling out before the fighting is resolved is being spun that way. Every military action we're involved in gets analyzed by civilians 20 ways until sunday, to the point where civilian reception figures into military strategy as much as defeating the enemy, and so on.

See, people don't like slaughters and collateral damage, they never have. One of the big reasons why under Martial Law the goverment takes control of the news media, is so it can determine what the people actually hear, and you don't have people screaming about how our troops are a bunch of baby killers. Rather if civilians hear about military actions at all, it's in a very brief, very official blurb, etc. We kind of hoped with "The Patriot Act" that US Citizens would be smart and well educated enough to be realistic about things like collateral damage, but just like we hoped for a mature attitude on civil liberties in a war situation, we saw that it failed.

... and your right, there are TONS of moral issues with all of this, but that's exactly why Martial Law exists. War bloody sucks, we try to avoid them, but when it happens it all comes down to who the biggest bastard is. All tales of heroic troops fighting the good fight, and winning with honor and a lack of collateral damage (it's always the other guys that do that, cuz they're the bad guys) are BS propaganda. There is no good or evil or right and wrong anymore, when the war actually happens it becomes "our side against their side" and whoever wins gets to write the history books talking about how great they are. How do you think history books would read if the Nazis won World War II? Do you think they would take the blame for half those historical atrocities, or would it be the "evil Americans and Brits" who did all the really bad stuff? The patriot act was largely drafted by guys who gave American citizens too much credit for being able to really get that.

 

[MrTub]

If the domains are not in the US, Homeland Security has no jurisdiction over them.

You can say that all you want, but that's not going to stop them if they want something down.

YEAH MAN BECAUSE LIKE AMERICA RULES THE WORLD DUDE THEY CAN DO WHATEVER THEY WANT BECAUSE.... AMERICA!

OT:Even if the remove the addon another will get made and even if there isn't there will be plenty of ways of finding the new domains.

I wasn't even siding with them, just stating. And yeah, America can pretty much do whatever it wants, who's going to stop them? No one. Obviously they wouldn't go crazy but if they did, you couldn't do much.

Yeah cause USA is going to start invading other countries just cause we aint their *****. And fun fact do you know what will happen with USA if china & rest of the world would stop buying your stuff?

 

[Weaver]

The American government can, once again, go fuck themselves. I really wished I lived in Canada. You guys are awesome.

We just voted in the Canadian equivalent of George Bush.
I'd look elsewhere. I know I am.

 

[draythefingerless]

I'm a big supporter of Homeland Security, and actually felt that "The Patriot Act" does not go far enough in what it needs to do. I supported Gitmo, and all kinds of things that make left wingers uneasy to even think about.... however in reading this, and similar things, I can't help but say "WTF Is Homeland Security doing involved in this?". There is no justification for using what is supposed to be an organization intended to defend the country against terrorist threats, acting as a punkhammer for anti-piracy slapfights. It's sort of like how the definition of "Terrorism" is extended and trampled on to deal with any kind of major case that law enforcement needs a bit more oomph with.

It's like this, unless Homeland Security can prove that there is some direct connection to terrorism, they need to butt out. By this I don't just mean hypothetical exploitation by terrorists.

It's this kind of irresponsibility, and the breadth of operations of "Homeland Security" that cause people to have so many problems with them. I believe such organizations can operate without abuses of their authority, or taking undue advantage of a broad mandate, but actions like this certainly make my defense of them being a lot more difficult. Piracy revolves around private businesses losing money, NOT about threats to our nation as a whole, Homeland Security has no part being involved here, heck there are plenty of criminal cases that they get involved in where they shouldn't besides this.

I might not care for piracy, but this while thing just generally stinks. Piracy might be wrong, but you can commit greater wrongs in the course of going after it, and abusing authority given to deal with terrorists so some company can save a few bucks is one of
those greater evils.

What's interesting is that you are in favor of the patriot act, but you fear the abuse of power.

[]

This is troll, yes?
Cause, if not - must be Kim Jon Ill, Mao, or Stalin in disguise.

No AMERICAN - who support the US Constitution would be a fan of the P.A.T.R.I.O.T. A.C.T 2 - unless they're traitors.

Alright hopefully this copy/paste worked since I'm not sure how to get multi-quotig to work otherwise (having failed before).

To explain myself:

I consider the potential for power to be abused, and the actual abuse of power to be two entirely differant things. If you go after POTENTIAL for abuse, by definition you can't have any laws or enforcable rules, since anything can potentially be abused.

I have no objections to the existance of something like Homeland security, as long as they are kept an eye on, and are forced to keep within their mandated area, as opposed to being allowed to extend their area of influance to other areas of law. As I see it, Homeland Security has a lot of power, but is intended to have a very limited jurisdiction within which to use that power, and they need to be called on it when they start going outside of their allowed sandbox.

My attitude on "The Patriot Act" is similar. Simply put, when dealing with a nation, and the needs of dealing with other nations and opposing cultures in an adversarial fashion, national security becomes a concern. In times of outright conflict, the need for national security is nessicarly going to be very high. A lot of the rights and freedoms we posses by their very nature cannot exist in a time of national crisis if we want to preserve the nation as a whole. This is why the goverment has always had access to war powers, and the abillity to do things like declare martial law. Our rights and freedoms were never an absolute, and could always be taken away from us under such circumstances, albiet temporarly. Whether you like what happned or not, this is how the goverment got us through World War II. They quashed free speech and freedomn of the press, US Nazi supporters and anti-war isolationists were prevented from expressing themselves, the goverment turned propaganda into overdrive, and while a huge moral issue, it did things like round up and hold the Japanese citizens for the duration of the war (and incidently they WERE freed, a point a lot of people tend to forget when talking about the abuse of power. Exactly what was supposed to happen, is what happened there, even if it was distasteful).

"The Patriot Act" inherantly does nothing that I disapprove of for the situation it was intended for. What it does is effectively give the goverment a middle ground between invoking full on war powers/martial law, and peacetime operations. That DOES represent something of a slippery slope, and I personally prefer an "all or nothing" attitude here, especially seeing as I think a lot of our current problems with "The War On Terror" are due to being half assed and not keeping domestic sentiment in line properly, but I can see why this was done, and why it's worth experimenting with.

If anything, by straddling the line between wartime and peacetime policy, it castrates itself by raising too many questions about civil law vs. emergency law, and what courts should have jurisdiction over specific things in this kind of situation.

For the most part it does work though, because it lets the goverment do things like round up societal enemies, and ignore a lot of the peacetime due process rights and civil liberties, while at the same time allowing things like free speech and freedom of the press to remain in play. Of course the problem is that you wind up with the issue of the free speech being using to try and castrate the govermental authority being allowed by these same laws.

As much as people might dislike war powers, we wouldn't be here right now if we didn't have them. What's more I trust our goverment when it comes to the "big issues" more than on the small ones, largely because after declaring martial law in World War II, it did wind up relinquishing those powers, and for all the whining, it eventually let The Japanese out of the camps rather than finding constant excuses to keep them locked up beyond the need.

Right now I think "The Patriot Act" needs to stay in play. If it's pulled, I think we're in a place right now that it should be done in the way of invoking full martial law in order to resolve the current problems, rather than returning to peacetime operations.

The issue when it comes to powers like this being why they are used. When it comes to Homeland Security for example, I fully support them stepping all over the "rights" of suspected terrorists. What they do being open to review, with all kinds of eyes on them. We did all kinds of nasty things during "World War II" in order to stop german spies and the like. Check out the US propaganda department at the Smithosonian sometime as well. To put it bluntly in that "good" war, we basically won by being bigger bastards than the Germans were. The problem is when Homeland security goes beyond it's mandate and starts using it's authority in purely civil matters. If it could logically tie it's behavior into stopping terrorism or enabling the US to win it's current wars, you wouldn't hear much complaining from me, but I fail to see how defending the IP rights of private businesses in any way involves anything but the bottom line of those businesses. At least if they pull some Muslim into a special national security subset of the legal system due to his social circle, backround, or recorded conversation, they can justify how that impacts national security when we're at war with The Middle East (similar to how doing it to a German could be justified when we were at war with Germany), what your seeing here can't be defended that way.

As far as claims like "OMG, Therumancer your a Nazi Stalinist, no real American would support some of the things you defend!", this is pretty much what "real America" is all about, we've already been here, we've already done these things, and we've had the abillity to do stuff like this since the country was founded. The USA during wartime, and the USA during peacetime are *VERY* differant entities... but again, people who make moral arguements typically don't have the remotest clue of what we've done, or why such things have had to be done. They operate under the illusion of a set of absolute freedoms that were never absolute and which have been removed temporarly in the past.

At any rate, this is long and rambling, but the bottom line is that I support The Patriot Act because it's there, and in play. After the current crisis, I do think he needs to be laid to rest, and in the future when such situations occur we need to just invoke Martial Law and be straightforward about it, because we've caused more problems than we solved due to trying to be nice and find a middle path when there really can't be one.

It's kind of ironic when people go off about "The Patriot Act" when they don't realize that it was started to preserve as much freedom as possible in a time of crisis as opposed to either having the glories of peavetime, or the complete removal of liberties that comes with wartime.

A moderate Patriot Act defender? appauled. Althou one thing....

What crisis? a couple of buildings got blown up? thats a crisis? you are very far, as a nation, from understanding what a war crisis is. what you got was a little tiny piece of taste of what a crisis really is. Crisis is having your countries identity nearly destroyed. Crisis is seeing everything you know threatened, really threatened, not some burka dude with a camera in a fucking cave across the world yelling i will kill you all. Since you seem to be a person with a very patriotic personality, you should be suggesting that your country be less intrusive, specially in the Middle East. I might sound very wrong with what im about to say, but you got in 9/11 was a taste of what that area of the world has been getting for a long time. They are poor, desperate, and angry. You make yourselves a target and then just let them hit you.

And are you honestly suggesting that invading Iraq was necessary for national safety?

How things always were and are doesnt make them right. Slavery was around for milennia, it always were, thats how things went. Oh, until we decided THAT IT WASNT RIGHT AT ALL. Or Are you suggesting it too was right? -_-

I hear where youre coming from, but im gonna have to call bullshit on it. sorry

 

[Therumancer]

snip

You seem to be mistaking what is and has been as what should be and what should have been.
Are you seriously defending the U.S.'s WWII Japanese internment camps, just because they were let free eventually? After which many thousands were out of work, businesses and homes were lost or destroyed? They shouldn't have fucking been there in the first place. Are you seriously defending the U.S. government's acquisition of 'suspected terrorists' who are held and tortured, without trial, for indefinite periods of time? The unlawful tapping of phone lines and the ability to erase someone's existence without any warrant or legal reason?
I'm sorry, but that is extremely short-sighted and stupid. The fact that you believe that the government, now that it was able to usher this piece of legislature through during a time of political fervor and fear, will EVER relinquish it is a testament to your naivete. The powers the Patriot Act give to the government to pursue those domestic influences that they don't want around are far too useful for them to give it up at any time. Preserving the nation might entail all revolutionary changes that might in fact threaten the current status quot, for all we know.
Also, martial law is possibly one of the most dangerous tools a government has in it's disposal. It doesn't matter if it's a 'time of crisis' (how the hell are we in a time of crisis? 9/11 was the result of our own government's inadequacies and almost all terrorist acts are ones of retribution for the shit our government perpetrates in the middle east), the freedoms of the people should never be infringed upon, especially since 90% of these 'crises' are situations that the government has gotten itself into without the knowledge or true consent of those who elected it and it claims to protect.
God, damn. I mad.

You are quite correct that I defend what they did to the Japanese during World War II. We have the luxury of judging this desician from a distance. At the time the survivial of our nation was at stake, and we were dealing with a group of fanatics who did things like put themselves into flying bombs and launch themselves at ships. We had major problems with espianage, and domestic sentiment over guys like Hitler who was an international man of the year. We chose to take the Japanese and lock them up for the duration give the fanaticism on display. Retroactively we can say "hey that was unjustified, there wasn't any sabotage, acts of terrorism or spying by The Japanese", well of course there wasn't because we locked them all up. Had we not done so, we'd probably be looking at a very differant situation.

Moral outrage, is EXACTLY why things like Martial Law exist, so what needs to be done can be done, and the goverment can control the situation. There is nothing remotely nice about wars, and people hate them for good reason, that still doesn't change the fact that when they come to pass you have to fight them, and do what you need to in order to ensure your own survivial. You can morally QQ after your done and are alive to have that luxury.

When it comes to counter-intelligence, and what is done in it's name, again it's about the survival of a nation. In war, it's the biggest bastards who win. Grabbing people on suspician and interrogating them sucks... and hey, wars suck, amazing what a connection that is.

To be blunt, people tend to go a little overboard due to personal paranoia when it comes to the whole espionage/counter-espionage game. To be frank, the goverment has better things to do, especially in a time of crisis, than to torture innocent people for fun. The people who get picked up for this kind of thing are grabbed for a reason. The only real differance being that those reasons aren't justified by peacetime standards. During peacetime you have the luxury of weeks, months, or years to find out the truth of something, in a time of crisis that isn't the case, the fate of not only millions of people, but the survivial of your own society relies on getting results, right now. Simply put the more time the goverment wastes on someone without information, the less they gain. While the methods might be distasteful, the very reason for those powers and the situation that enables them generally means they aren't going to be abused, and so far they haven't been, we've just seen a lot of bellyaching over the process by civilians due to the partial implementation of martial law that is "The Patriot Act" and allowing this kind of thing without associated media control is exactly why this experiment have failed, The American people aren't mature enough to deal with reality in a time of crisis like it was hoped they would be.

Overall, Martial Law is an extreme thing, and it CAN be abused, there are nations who have instituted martial law, and then never ceased having Marial Law in force. Overall though, the US has shown restraint over using it and then removing it when the time has past. I might have my problems with the US goverment, but honestly I tend to trust it more on the big issues than the small ones. Even the much-hated "Patriot Act" was actually an attempt to curtail goverment power and favor civilians, by trying to get the nessicary jobs done without putting the nation under full martial law. I don't entirely approve of that for a lot of reasons, but the intent was still there, and you have to give credit where it's due.

Simply put we have two sets of rules, one for peace time, one for times of national crisis. Nobody likes giving up the peacetime standards, and nobody likes being under the total control of someone else, even an institution like a goverment. That's a given, and it's been that way since pretty much forever. There is no need to point out how immoral a lot of things permitted under martial law are, after all that's understood, and why it exists to begin with.

 

[boag]

America doesn't have jurisdiction on the internet, I don't really see how they could legally do this.

Well they have Jurisdiction over any Data centers that are in the country, but censorship of this Type is akin to the one used in China, Australia, North Korea and some middle Eastern Countries.

I find it Ironic that most of the domain Seizures are done because the Movie Industry is pushing for them, but at the same time they want to advocate freedom of speech and no censorship in other countries that do not allow their movies to be Displayed.

 

[erztez]

You are quite correct that I defend what they did to the Japanese during World War II. We have the luxury of judging this desician from a distance. At the time the survivial of our nation was at stake, and we were dealing with a group of fanatics who did things like put themselves into flying bombs and launch themselves at ships. We had major problems with espianage, and domestic sentiment over guys like Hitler who was an international man of the year. We chose to take the Japanese and lock them up for the duration give the fanaticism on display. Retroactively we can say "hey that was unjustified, there wasn't any sabotage, acts of terrorism or spying by The Japanese", well of course there wasn't because we locked them all up. Had we not done so, we'd probably be looking at a very differant situation.

Moral outrage, is EXACTLY why things like Martial Law exist, so what needs to be done can be done, and the goverment can control the situation. There is nothing remotely nice about wars, and people hate them for good reason, that still doesn't change the fact that when they come to pass you have to fight them, and do what you need to in order to ensure your own survivial. You can morally QQ after your done and are alive to have that luxury.

When it comes to counter-intelligence, and what is done in it's name, again it's about the survival of a nation. In war, it's the biggest bastards who win. Grabbing people on suspician and interrogating them sucks... and hey, wars suck, amazing what a connection that is.

To be blunt, people tend to go a little overboard due to personal paranoia when it comes to the whole espionage/counter-espionage game. To be frank, the goverment has better things to do, especially in a time of crisis, than to torture innocent people for fun. The people who get picked up for this kind of thing are grabbed for a reason. The only real differance being that those reasons aren't justified by peacetime standards. During peacetime you have the luxury of weeks, months, or years to find out the truth of something, in a time of crisis that isn't the case, the fate of not only millions of people, but the survivial of your own society relies on getting results, right now. Simply put the more time the goverment wastes on someone without information, the less they gain. While the methods might be distasteful, the very reason for those powers and the situation that enables them generally means they aren't going to be abused, and so far they haven't been, we've just seen a lot of bellyaching over the process by civilians due to the partial implementation of martial law that is "The Patriot Act" and allowing this kind of thing without associated media control is exactly why this experiment have failed, The American people aren't mature enough to deal with reality in a time of crisis like it was hoped they would be.

Overall, Martial Law is an extreme thing, and it CAN be abused, there are nations who have instituted martial law, and then never ceased having Marial Law in force. Overall though, the US has shown restraint over using it and then removing it when the time has past. I might have my problems with the US goverment, but honestly I tend to trust it more on the big issues than the small ones. Even the much-hated "Patriot Act" was actually an attempt to curtail goverment power and favor civilians, by trying to get the nessicary jobs done without putting the nation under full martial law. I don't entirely approve of that for a lot of reasons, but the intent was still there, and you have to give credit where it's due.

Simply put we have two sets of rules, one for peace time, one for times of national crisis. Nobody likes giving up the peacetime standards, and nobody likes being under the total control of someone else, even an institution like a goverment. That's a given, and it's been that way since pretty much forever. There is no need to point out how immoral a lot of things permitted under martial law are, after all that's understood, and why it exists to begin with.

The thing is, when, in the last, oh, 100 years, has the US not been in one war or another?
Mostly wars they made up or had nothing to do with in the first place(Korea, Vietnam, Gulf, War on Drugs(and they've pulled some funny crap with that one), etc.)
There's always an excuse...

 

[erztez]

so is the DHS gona back down or is it gona take the plunge and use someof those cyber war things i keep reading about.

Define "cyber war things" and I'll try to give you an answer

 

[Worgen]

I'm a big supporter of Homeland Security, and actually felt that "The Patriot Act" does not go far enough in what it needs to do. I supported Gitmo, and all kinds of things that make left wingers uneasy to even think about.... however in reading this, and similar things, I can't help but say "WTF Is Homeland Security doing involved in this?". There is no justification for using what is supposed to be an organization intended to defend the country against terrorist threats, acting as a punkhammer for anti-piracy slapfights. It's sort of like how the definition of "Terrorism" is extended and trampled on to deal with any kind of major case that law enforcement needs a bit more oomph with.

It's like this, unless Homeland Security can prove that there is some direct connection to terrorism, they need to butt out. By this I don't just mean hypothetical exploitation by terrorists.

It's this kind of irresponsibility, and the breadth of operations of "Homeland Security" that cause people to have so many problems with them. I believe such organizations can operate without abuses of their authority, or taking undue advantage of a broad mandate, but actions like this certainly make my defense of them being a lot more difficult. Piracy revolves around private businesses losing money, NOT about threats to our nation as a whole, Homeland Security has no part being involved here, heck there are plenty of criminal cases that they get involved in where they shouldn't besides this.

I might not care for piracy, but this while thing just generally stinks. Piracy might be wrong, but you can commit greater wrongs in the course of going after it, and abusing authority given to deal with terrorists so some company can save a few bucks is one of
those greater evils.

This is troll, yes?
Cause, if not - must be Kim Jon Ill, Mao, or Stalin in disguise.

No AMERICAN - who support the US Constitution would be a fan of the P.A.T.R.I.O.T. A.C.T 2 - unless they're traitors.

Ok, you owe me my sanity, as now I have to defend this guy, even though I dislike hate what he said. You just used the "No True Scotsman" fallacy. There are plenty of Americans who do support the PATRIOT act, which does not make them traitors. It certainly makes me and many others think much less of them, but it doesn't make them traitors.

your right that it doesnt make them traitors but it does make them pansies that dont really understand why we have constitutional protections "the government is big enough to give us everything we want and powerful enough to take everything you have" Thomis Jefferson

 

[Alar]

Way to go Mozilla.

...Not that those sites are probably anything worth visiting. But freedom of information is no trivial matter, and such censorship against an application - to the extent it should exist - should certainly go through a thorough legal evaluation in a court of law, not be handed out by the administrative branch at the request of private companies.

Definitely. This is certainly something I hope gets the necessary amount of legal procedure, rather than just threats and 'requests'.

 

[Therumancer]

A moderate Patriot Act defender? appauled. Althou one thing....

What crisis? a couple of buildings got blown up? thats a crisis? you are very far, as a nation, from understanding what a war crisis is. what you got was a little tiny piece of taste of what a crisis really is. Crisis is having your countries identity nearly destroyed. Crisis is seeing everything you know threatened, really threatened, not some burka dude with a camera in a fucking cave across the world yelling i will kill you all. Since you seem to be a person with a very patriotic personality, you should be suggesting that your country be less intrusive, specially in the Middle East. I might sound very wrong with what im about to say, but you got in 9/11 was a taste of what that area of the world has been getting for a long time. They are poor, desperate, and angry. You make yourselves a target and then just let them hit you.

And are you honestly suggesting that invading Iraq was necessary for national safety?

How things always were and are doesnt make them right. Slavery was around for milennia, it always were, thats how things went. Oh, until we decided THAT IT WASNT RIGHT AT ALL. Or Are you suggesting it too was right? -_-

I hear where youre coming from, but im gonna have to call bullshit on it. sorry

Well, you'd be right if you didn't underplay or misunderstand the 9/11 attacks. See, people tend to think that the 9-11 attacks were the destruction of The World Trade Center. That's only part of it. The 9-11 attacks were a decapitation strike launched against the USA, where our entire goverment was targeted. People tend to forget that The Pentagon was also hit successfully, and survived due to dumb luck since the plane didn't hit correctly, and where it DID hit was an area that was under refurbishment. We also had other planes heading for DC at the time, with the presumbed targets being the Capital Building and/or White House. People like to talk about heroic passenger uprisings, but the reality seems to be that we shot them down with fighter jets before they could reach the target.

The actual damage from the more or less failed attack doesn't change the intent, and what would have happened had the planes hit all of the targets. Simply put there wouldn't be a USA right now. Hitting the WTC caused shockwaves all around the world as it was due to it being a nerve center for global finance and well... trade. If The Pentagon went down it would have done massive damage to not only the US military and command structure (we'd lose a lot of our upper echelon command, logistical coordination, and of course records) but all the other nations that effectively wind up operating under direction from The Pentagon. NATO, UN Peacekeepers, and all of those things would have felt a massive backlash. Had we seen The Capital and/or White House hit, we'd be looking at missing one or two entire sections of our goverment for all intents and purposes.

A lot of the "peace at any price" crowd like to talk down the 9-11 attacks and try and say it was just a couple of buildings... it wasn't, it was an attempt to destroy the USA. The intent is bloody obvious, and everyone knows what it was if they bother to think about it, which they don't.

If anything the US has responded with kid gloves, we didn't institute martial law, and despite the fact that we're dealing with what amounts to a cultural war, we've been insisting on treating the problem as very specific groups of fanatics, rather than acting more effectively and in our best interest by simply accepting that the fanatics are simply a symptom of the overall problem which is the regional culture throughout The Middle East.

Going after Afghanistan was a no-brainer, though we were stupid about it. That's where Bin Ladin was, but we decided to telegraph our moves by trying to deal with guys like Mullah Omar first, due to the hopes that The Taliban would remain our allies after we pretty much gave themn control of Afghanistan. It didn't pan out, and we invaded, but only once Bin Ladin knew we were coming and was able to run. We also made a mistake of being politically correct in the region, after we won, we didn't assert ourselves on their constitution, and as a result we wound up with Afghanistan declaring itself a "Muslim Nation" without even the seeds of them becoming progressive in their new constitution.

Iraq was another obvious target, because while not directly related, Saddam had been thumbing his nose at the US ever since he sold out to the pre-collapse Russians. We however again went in with kid gloves, did the whole "winning the peace" thing, wound up with another "Islamic Nation" costitution with no progressive seeds, and a massive bill to pay.

The concern over Iraq and WMD was well founded, and the funny thing is that while on one hand people like to go off on Bush for not finding any WMD or anything, at the same time we know he did, and nobody wants to flat out admit we did the right thing.

"What are you smoking Therumancer?" you might be thinking, well consider that WMD means more than just nukes, which is the only thing people want to accept. Iraq had a wealth of chemical weapons, and indeed you'll notice one of the victories we scored down there was getting "Chemical Ali" who was guilty of mass murder by deploying chemical weapons on Kurds. Notice nobody exactly protested his innocence as he went down, or denied that he had, or used them. It's just that we were dealing with a sort of unstated "chemical weapons don't count" disclaimer which is kind of silly. Everyone knew about this guy in paticular, they knew he had the weapons, and there was evidence he used them. The guy was also apparently convicted. That right there justifies why we went in, but few people want to give that kind of credit. People know about "Chemical Ali" but nobody wants to actually connect him to WMD. While it was kind of sat on (and is hard to find) there was also a bit for a while about how a lot of poisons were found in the rivers of Iraq because the surrendering Iraqi military units pretty much flushed their chemical weapons so they wouldn't be caught with them. It wasn't nukes, and it wasn't weaponized Anthrax, so people pretty much decided to just let it go.


One of the things with intelligence and counter-intelligence is that by it's very nature people don't tend to know what's been found. The US has been facing a crisis, but the nature of terrorism and counter-intelligence is such that it's impossible for the people to know what has been found, how, and why. See, if a terrorist cell was found that actually had a dirty bomb, and was stopped 2 second away from the counter reaching 0 (like in a movie) we'd never know that happened, it would be classified.

What's more, when it comes to things like gitmo, and the interrogation of suspects, part of the reason why there is special rules is because we can't disclose the information the goverment is operating on. If we have say a spy sitting in a terrorist organization on the other side of the world who tells us that this dude who came to the US is a terrorist and involved in a plot, we can't out the source of that information without losing the contact and whatever else they might provide. Simply by saying we have a mole, could very well get our agent killed, never mind trying to bring him down here to testify. Likewise, we don't nessicarly want a terrorist to be able to communicate with anyone, and give details on how they were nailed, or what we know, because that could provide information on our sources and who we have in the field. It's a good thing if a terrorist organization thinks we are just doing random sweeps and getting lucky.

To a civilian, what looks like maniacs randomly grabbing people, and making them disappear isn't going to be the case. The goverment doesn't have the resources or time to waste on messing with pointless people for fun. If it nails someone, there is going to be a reason, and there are going to be reasons why they can't justify it to civilian standards, hence the need for things like martial law, and special rules in a time of crisis like this. "The Patriot Act" being an attempt to compromise, by putting the police powers into effect, but not otherwise intruding on civilian rights. It failed because the central assumption that American civilians would be smart enough to "get it" proved false, and instead we wound up with a lot of people screaming about violations of civilian law and rights that wouldn't apply under martial law, which were given undue weight because martial law was never actually declared, creating a huge mess with people argueing back and forth about how far "The Patriot Act" should be allowed to go.

See, a lot of people who like to make noise simply don't "get" that the goverment isn't going to cover the bill for some guy to make a Dominos pizza driver disappear because it makes their balls feel big. All of these secret prisons, interrogations, and everything else cost money, the goverment by it's very nature is going to be counting the beans, and if someone is disappeared or sent to Gitmo, you can guarantee someone had to work hard to prove to the guy with his hands on the purse-strings that this was worth the expense.... or simply I can say I trust my goverment here because they are both greedy and cheap. It's just like police work, unlike on TV there are budgets in play, and nobody authorizes all those fancy DNA tests and stuff without some bloody good reasons. Chances are if some guy gets nailed as a terrorist and dragged off by Homeland Security there were probably at least a couple of guys who had to be convinced just to part with the money.

 

[McMullen]

snip

You seem to be mistaking what is and has been as what should be and what should have been.
Are you seriously defending the U.S.'s WWII Japanese internment camps, just because they were let free eventually? After which many thousands were out of work, businesses and homes were lost or destroyed? They shouldn't have fucking been there in the first place. Are you seriously defending the U.S. government's acquisition of 'suspected terrorists' who are held and tortured, without trial, for indefinite periods of time? The unlawful tapping of phone lines and the ability to erase someone's existence without any warrant or legal reason?
I'm sorry, but that is extremely short-sighted and stupid. The fact that you believe that the government, now that it was able to usher this piece of legislature through during a time of political fervor and fear, will EVER relinquish it is a testament to your naivete. The powers the Patriot Act give to the government to pursue those domestic influences that they don't want around are far too useful for them to give it up at any time. Preserving the nation might entail all revolutionary changes that might in fact threaten the current status quot, for all we know.
Also, martial law is possibly one of the most dangerous tools a government has in it's disposal. It doesn't matter if it's a 'time of crisis' (how the hell are we in a time of crisis? 9/11 was the result of our own government's inadequacies and almost all terrorist acts are ones of retribution for the shit our government perpetrates in the middle east), the freedoms of the people should never be infringed upon, especially since 90% of these 'crises' are situations that the government has gotten itself into without the knowledge or true consent of those who elected it and it claims to protect.
God, damn. I mad.

You are quite correct that I defend what they did to the Japanese during World War II. We have the luxury of judging this desician from a distance. At the time the survivial of our nation was at stake, and we were dealing with a group of fanatics who did things like put themselves into flying bombs and launch themselves at ships. We had major problems with espianage, and domestic sentiment over guys like Hitler who was an international man of the year. We chose to take the Japanese and lock them up for the duration give the fanaticism on display. Retroactively we can say "hey that was unjustified, there wasn't any sabotage, acts of terrorism or spying by The Japanese", well of course there wasn't because we locked them all up. Had we not done so, we'd probably be looking at a very differant situation.

Moral outrage, is EXACTLY why things like Martial Law exist, so what needs to be done can be done, and the goverment can control the situation. There is nothing remotely nice about wars, and people hate them for good reason, that still doesn't change the fact that when they come to pass you have to fight them, and do what you need to in order to ensure your own survivial. You can morally QQ after your done and are alive to have that luxury.

When it comes to counter-intelligence, and what is done in it's name, again it's about the survival of a nation. In war, it's the biggest bastards who win. Grabbing people on suspician and interrogating them sucks... and hey, wars suck, amazing what a connection that is.

To be blunt, people tend to go a little overboard due to personal paranoia when it comes to the whole espionage/counter-espionage game. To be frank, the goverment has better things to do, especially in a time of crisis, than to torture innocent people for fun. The people who get picked up for this kind of thing are grabbed for a reason. The only real differance being that those reasons aren't justified by peacetime standards. During peacetime you have the luxury of weeks, months, or years to find out the truth of something, in a time of crisis that isn't the case, the fate of not only millions of people, but the survivial of your own society relies on getting results, right now. Simply put the more time the goverment wastes on someone without information, the less they gain. While the methods might be distasteful, the very reason for those powers and the situation that enables them generally means they aren't going to be abused, and so far they haven't been, we've just seen a lot of bellyaching over the process by civilians due to the partial implementation of martial law that is "The Patriot Act" and allowing this kind of thing without associated media control is exactly why this experiment have failed, The American people aren't mature enough to deal with reality in a time of crisis like it was hoped they would be.

Overall, Martial Law is an extreme thing, and it CAN be abused, there are nations who have instituted martial law, and then never ceased having Marial Law in force. Overall though, the US has shown restraint over using it and then removing it when the time has past. I might have my problems with the US goverment, but honestly I tend to trust it more on the big issues than the small ones. Even the much-hated "Patriot Act" was actually an attempt to curtail goverment power and favor civilians, by trying to get the nessicary jobs done without putting the nation under full martial law. I don't entirely approve of that for a lot of reasons, but the intent was still there, and you have to give credit where it's due.

Simply put we have two sets of rules, one for peace time, one for times of national crisis. Nobody likes giving up the peacetime standards, and nobody likes being under the total control of someone else, even an institution like a goverment. That's a given, and it's been that way since pretty much forever. There is no need to point out how immoral a lot of things permitted under martial law are, after all that's understood, and why it exists to begin with.

Given that it was only the Japanese, and not the Italians and Germans in America, that were relocated, I'm going to go ahead and say that simple racism had as much or more to do with the internment program than national security.

And we were not very careful about just who we sent to places like Bagram and Gitmo. There were people who were turned in by their neighbors just for the general bounty on Al-Quaeda supporters, whether they had anything to do with Al-Quaeda or not.

You may have a point in saying that we can't take the time to be as careful as we should be during war-time (which, for this one, I disagree with; It's not nearly as urgent as, say WWII), but some of the people in Gitmo and some of the people put under surveillance had as much business being imprisoned or scrutinized as the Japanese did being relocated. Those were colossal failures on the part of the people managing those situations and should never have happened, and there was a lot more to it than just the haste of wartime. That those imprisoned weren't given real trials for a few years was also excessive, and the reasons given for it were insufficient. If you imprison someone without trial, you better be damn sure that they're guilty. If you merely suspect them, then that's not enough. George Bush said of men later found innocent that they were being held without access to lawyers or other representation, and without trial, while being tortured, because they were "the worst of the worst". War or no war, we've got to do better than this.

 

[draythefingerless]

A moderate Patriot Act defender? appauled. Althou one thing....

What crisis? a couple of buildings got blown up? thats a crisis? you are very far, as a nation, from understanding what a war crisis is. what you got was a little tiny piece of taste of what a crisis really is. Crisis is having your countries identity nearly destroyed. Crisis is seeing everything you know threatened, really threatened, not some burka dude with a camera in a fucking cave across the world yelling i will kill you all. Since you seem to be a person with a very patriotic personality, you should be suggesting that your country be less intrusive, specially in the Middle East. I might sound very wrong with what im about to say, but you got in 9/11 was a taste of what that area of the world has been getting for a long time. They are poor, desperate, and angry. You make yourselves a target and then just let them hit you.

And are you honestly suggesting that invading Iraq was necessary for national safety?

How things always were and are doesnt make them right. Slavery was around for milennia, it always were, thats how things went. Oh, until we decided THAT IT WASNT RIGHT AT ALL. Or Are you suggesting it too was right? -_-

I hear where youre coming from, but im gonna have to call bullshit on it. sorry

Well, you'd be right if you didn't underplay or misunderstand the 9/11 attacks. See, people tend to think that the 9-11 attacks were the destruction of The World Trade Center. That's only part of it. The 9-11 attacks were a decapitation strike launched against the USA, where our entire goverment was targeted. People tend to forget that The Pentagon was also hit successfully, and survived due to dumb luck since the plane didn't hit correctly, and where it DID hit was an area that was under refurbishment. We also had other planes heading for DC at the time, with the presumbed targets being the Capital Building and/or White House. People like to talk about heroic passenger uprisings, but the reality seems to be that we shot them down with fighter jets before they could reach the target.

The actual damage from the more or less failed attack doesn't change the intent, and what would have happened had the planes hit all of the targets. Simply put there wouldn't be a USA right now. Hitting the WTC caused shockwaves all around the world as it was due to it being a nerve center for global finance and well... trade. If The Pentagon went down it would have done massive damage to not only the US military and command structure (we'd lose a lot of our upper echelon command, logistical coordination, and of course records) but all the other nations that effectively wind up operating under direction from The Pentagon. NATO, UN Peacekeepers, and all of those things would have felt a massive backlash. Had we seen The Capital and/or White House hit, we'd be looking at missing one or two entire sections of our goverment for all intents and purposes.

A lot of the "peace at any price" crowd like to talk down the 9-11 attacks and try and say it was just a couple of buildings... it wasn't, it was an attempt to destroy the USA. The intent is bloody obvious, and everyone knows what it was if they bother to think about it, which they don't.

If anything the US has responded with kid gloves, we didn't institute martial law, and despite the fact that we're dealing with what amounts to a cultural war, we've been insisting on treating the problem as very specific groups of fanatics, rather than acting more effectively and in our best interest by simply accepting that the fanatics are simply a symptom of the overall problem which is the regional culture throughout The Middle East.

Going after Afghanistan was a no-brainer, though we were stupid about it. That's where Bin Ladin was, but we decided to telegraph our moves by trying to deal with guys like Mullah Omar first, due to the hopes that The Taliban would remain our allies after we pretty much gave themn control of Afghanistan. It didn't pan out, and we invaded, but only once Bin Ladin knew we were coming and was able to run. We also made a mistake of being politically correct in the region, after we won, we didn't assert ourselves on their constitution, and as a result we wound up with Afghanistan declaring itself a "Muslim Nation" without even the seeds of them becoming progressive in their new constitution.

Iraq was another obvious target, because while not directly related, Saddam had been thumbing his nose at the US ever since he sold out to the pre-collapse Russians. We however again went in with kid gloves, did the whole "winning the peace" thing, wound up with another "Islamic Nation" costitution with no progressive seeds, and a massive bill to pay.

The concern over Iraq and WMD was well founded, and the funny thing is that while on one hand people like to go off on Bush for not finding any WMD or anything, at the same time we know he did, and nobody wants to flat out admit we did the right thing.

"What are you smoking Therumancer?" you might be thinking, well consider that WMD means more than just nukes, which is the only thing people want to accept. Iraq had a wealth of chemical weapons, and indeed you'll notice one of the victories we scored down there was getting "Chemical Ali" who was guilty of mass murder by deploying chemical weapons on Kurds. Notice nobody exactly protested his innocence as he went down, or denied that he had, or used them. It's just that we were dealing with a sort of unstated "chemical weapons don't count" disclaimer which is kind of silly. Everyone knew about this guy in paticular, they knew he had the weapons, and there was evidence he used them. The guy was also apparently convicted. That right there justifies why we went in, but few people want to give that kind of credit. People know about "Chemical Ali" but nobody wants to actually connect him to WMD. While it was kind of sat on (and is hard to find) there was also a bit for a while about how a lot of poisons were found in the rivers of Iraq because the surrendering Iraqi military units pretty much flushed their chemical weapons so they wouldn't be caught with them. It wasn't nukes, and it wasn't weaponized Anthrax, so people pretty much decided to just let it go.


One of the things with intelligence and counter-intelligence is that by it's very nature people don't tend to know what's been found. The US has been facing a crisis, but the nature of terrorism and counter-intelligence is such that it's impossible for the people to know what has been found, how, and why. See, if a terrorist cell was found that actually had a dirty bomb, and was stopped 2 second away from the counter reaching 0 (like in a movie) we'd never know that happened, it would be classified.

What's more, when it comes to things like gitmo, and the interrogation of suspects, part of the reason why there is special rules is because we can't disclose the information the goverment is operating on. If we have say a spy sitting in a terrorist organization on the other side of the world who tells us that this dude who came to the US is a terrorist and involved in a plot, we can't out the source of that information without losing the contact and whatever else they might provide. Simply by saying we have a mole, could very well get our agent killed, never mind trying to bring him down here to testify. Likewise, we don't nessicarly want a terrorist to be able to communicate with anyone, and give details on how they were nailed, or what we know, because that could provide information on our sources and who we have in the field. It's a good thing if a terrorist organization thinks we are just doing random sweeps and getting lucky.

To a civilian, what looks like maniacs randomly grabbing people, and making them disappear isn't going to be the case. The goverment doesn't have the resources or time to waste on messing with pointless people for fun. If it nails someone, there is going to be a reason, and there are going to be reasons why they can't justify it to civilian standards, hence the need for things like martial law, and special rules in a time of crisis like this. "The Patriot Act" being an attempt to compromise, by putting the police powers into effect, but not otherwise intruding on civilian rights. It failed because the central assumption that American civilians would be smart enough to "get it" proved false, and instead we wound up with a lot of people screaming about violations of civilian law and rights that wouldn't apply under martial law, which were given undue weight because martial law was never actually declared, creating a huge mess with people argueing back and forth about how far "The Patriot Act" should be allowed to go.

See, a lot of people who like to make noise simply don't "get" that the goverment isn't going to cover the bill for some guy to make a Dominos pizza driver disappear because it makes their balls feel big. All of these secret prisons, interrogations, and everything else cost money, the goverment by it's very nature is going to be counting the beans, and if someone is disappeared or sent to Gitmo, you can guarantee someone had to work hard to prove to the guy with his hands on the purse-strings that this was worth the expense.... or simply I can say I trust my goverment here because they are both greedy and cheap. It's just like police work, unlike on TV there are budgets in play, and nobody authorizes all those fancy DNA tests and stuff without some bloody good reasons. Chances are if some guy gets nailed as a terrorist and dragged off by Homeland Security there were probably at least a couple of guys who had to be convinced just to part with the money.

North Korea. WMDs. National Safety. Theres a real threat. Go take care of it. Also, poison? Tons of countries have that. Chem weapons? Tons of rebellious and terrorist groups have that. And they dont like america many of them. You went there for one reason. You got hit, and you wanted to give people satisfaction. Thing is, people who defend American incursions into what is, in the end, and you cannot deny it, a very very very very foreign and weak threat to America in comparison to the TON of other ones out there, ones wich you COULD take out MUCH more easily, tend to forget that what the government plans to do, including its profit, is many times different from the result. Just because the government is capable of planning a massive excuse for invading the middle east, doesnt mean its gonna succeed. The patriotism after 9/11 was probably at its highest ever since the fucking end of World War 2. You can basically ask people to join the army and do shit for you in times like those, wich is what happened when Pearl Harbor got it. IN FACT, SINCE YOU LIKE TO MAKE COMPARISONS TO WW2, the 9/11 situation is almost AN EXACT COPY of what happened with Pearl Harbor. America sees something it wants, but cant participate in it without support, attack on them happens, people start to support, America goes in. Im not saying that America had knowledge of something like 9/11 was gonna happen(god forbid i think that) but it definitly knew what to do after it. And, WTC is overhyped as an important center for economy. It WAS important for organizing trading,and yeah, there was an IMMEDIATE negative effect, but it was a short term effect, a symptom of big, but non vital parts of an economy crashing. but really, you didnt get any consequences in the economy for it. No, that came after, when the Middle East plans utterly failed, and your domestic market PLUMMETED LIKE A ************.

On Gitmo. See, you say that they have to spend money, but really, it doesnt cost them that much. I agree, they have to bring some convincing evidence, i mean, if its a terrorist, they bring him in. But it doesnt partake much work.
And i really dont care about the actions that need to be taken, because in the end, you really were in no threat from Iraq. Its not that i think it was immoral, i just find it unnecessarily immoral. Afghanistan? Sure, it was a stupid idea, but i grant that you wanna go and hit Al Qaeda. i get that. You sent a whole fucking military force to battle guerrillas, wich is the stupidest tactical maneuver thing to do, but at least i get the intention was jutsified. Iraq? Not really. The UN told you not to, everyone told you not to, that it wasnt worth it, YOUR OWN PEOPLE WERE TELLING YOU, that what you found there wasnt worth it, and it really wasnt, but you went in anyway.

FINAL THING, if finding WMDs are such a secret, why was the entire intel investigation undertaken by the US, SHOWN DAILY UPDATES ON NATIONAL TV, EVERYWHERE IN THE WORLD. Now, youre gonna say, oh, its counter intel! but really, you didnt have real intel to begin with to provide counter intel....unless of course, you were trying to feed fake intel....ok i mindfucked myself with that last one . :/

PS: im viewing this from a logical point of view. iam not partaking morals into this, only if it was logical to ignore morals. and it wasnt. it was a really stupid plan. or evil. pick your devil.