Jack Ma was essentially on house arrest for over a year after flying a little too close to the sun with his IPO plans. Peng Shuai was on house arrest for denouncing sexual abuse by a CCP member.
The psychological, widespread chilling effects of these high profile "vanishings" has absolutely no commonality with the Patriot act (bad as it is).
The vanishings like the sheriff who had three voter registration workers killed in Mississippi are not common, it tends to be straightforward extrajudicial executions like Fred Hampton. I wouldn't even include the car bombing of 25 year old Ronni Moffitt in 1976.
The US police are killing people all the time. In January police killed an environmentalist in January, Manuel Taran. The US kills and jails political prisoners all the time.
But that sort of thing is just murder, not anything legally sanctioned by the patriot act. Don't get me wrong, I think the patriot act is a travesty, but it doesn't go quite that far.
"The killings were part of a broader program of "targeted killing" by the United States outside the context of armed conflict and based on vague legal standards, a closed executive process, and evidence never presented to the courts. "
Your comment sounds awfully disingenuous. I seriously doubt you do not see the huge difference between implementing official policies of extrajudicial imprisonments and having a random person murder people for their own personal reasons.
What are you talking about? OP did not mentioned any example remotely involving Guantanamo bay. Are you trying to move the goalpost out of ignorance or cynicism?
Any billionaire who thinks of themselves as indispensable to society and has a highly visible public presence. If Musk was behaving towards the CCP half as disrespectfully as he does towards the the US political caste, he'd have been stripped of his China holdings and locked out of that market long ago.
No, the equivalent in US wouldnt be a capitalist billionaire. It would be its opposite: a popular group with marxist or communist ideals that menaces the status quo and current order. Like the Black Panther Party. And, oh, they were disappeared, some of them still are in solitary confinenent because the government is afraid that they could spread their ideology to other inmates.
The only example you can find is from 40-50 years ago? Around the time that China (while we're at comparing with China) was having its military shoot protesters in Tiananmen square?
Just because the government here was so successful that there isn't any remotely threatening fundamental opposition doesn't mean they wouldn't do it again. Those people are still unjustly in prison and still haven't been released.
(R) party is left to exist as a group of useful idiots who never pass any meaningful legislation that isn't immediately dismantled by (D) establishment within a few years.
we are not a plutocracy at all, that's ridiculous. There are many places in the world where rich people hardly pay taxes. That is not at all true in the US where "the 1%" pay 40% of the income tax
if the rich controlled the government, don't you think they'd lower their taxes? or are we lucky to be ruled by the rich because they are so benevolent?
Rich people in America pay taxes, don't be ridiculous. Wealthy (D) supporters abroad don't file tax returns and don't get penalized for it unless they fall out of line with the party. Then suddenly they're audited every year. This also happened to Trump, even though he was filing in NY.
That's not the way things are done in the west. Lacking absolute rule, you need to achieve similar things with a little more subtlety.
Let's say a certain billionare enters politics, and is not a party favorite, and against the bipartisan elite consensus. Say, they are, god forbid, populist, and against job outsourcing, wars, and such.
Media, who loved him for decades, can suddenly start covering his every action as if describing the leader of the Axis in WWII. Suddenly his associates might start to get investigated for things all sides in DC did since time immemorial with impunity. Experts might appear day and night on TV to give a psychological assessment of him. Some high standing people might openly advocate for his elimination. Government agencies might join the "good fight". Mere tech corporations might decide to ban his (the active President's) account.
Others might pay some hack to come up with a bogus document binder hack job, a dossier if you will, that will feature day and night on the news. And inversely, his opponent's son might be news gold, be involved in all kinds of shady dealings, and even lose a certain computing device, and they're not covered, lest their parent is harmed.
Or let's say another billionaire lacks the good taste to not antagonize the consensus of the elites and their lapdogs in the aspirational classes. Perhaps their glowing "let's all kiss the ass of the billionaire tech god" coverage changes overnight...
The lack of verification of the claims made related to the "bogus document binder hack job" doesn't preclude the possibility of conspiracy, sedition, etc. actually occuring, and the dossier played essentially no role in subsequent investigations. He also wasn't exactly anti-war. On the campaign trail rhetorically he was, but aside from the (disastrous but did need to happen) withdrawal from Afghanistan mostly continued the imperialist status quo. Iran and Syria are high-profile examples. He is an authoritarian populist, yes. I'm not sure why only people with money would have a reason to oppose that. The main reason people oppose him is he is an ineffective, narcissistic leader who did his utmost to personally enrich himself, continue to fan the flames of division, and forcefully push through fiscal policy that was basically the opposite of what should have been implemented at the time. It was not all bad, but it is hard to find much good. The market does not like uncertainty, and a bombastic cult of personality ball of teenage angst is not who you want with the levers to the world's largest economy.
What does this have to do with mysterious vanishing?
The "media" includes Fox News - and it is, in audience terms, the most mainstream of them. It had absolutely glowing coverage of Trump throughout its presidency and continues heavy coverage of Biden's son. The "media" includes the Falun-affiliated Epoch Times, which is still widely available and continues along the same lines. The "media" includes Twitter, which its owner directed to get his own tweets significantly more audience.
None of these people can even remotely claim to have been vanished by the government.
>What does this have to do with mysterious vanishing?
Nothing. As the very first line of the comment goes: "That's not the way things are done in the west. Lacking absolute rule, you need to achieve similar things with a little more subtlety".
When establishment power is privitazed, distributed, and can be yielded more finely, you don't need to vanish people to shut them up or shut them down.
Bob Marley - needle with oncogenic viruses implanted into shoe
MLK Jr. - FBI–King suicide letter
Seth Rich - You should remember this one easily
Stephen Paddock - his life history was deleted from databases (4chan archived lots of it before it vanished) and he was hit with a character assassination to deflect from what actually happened in Vegas (failed firearms sale to would-be murderers of the Saudi royal family staying upstairs)
That's just off the top of my head. Bill Oxley claimed to do in 17 people for Uncle Sam but the "legitimate news sites" which are totally not compromised by Operation Mockingbird conveniently discredit that theory.
Oh yeah crazy effects of the Patriot act indeed...
Edit: your post kinda proves the point. You're evidently not afraid of posting stuff online that most people would consider crazy conspiracy BS ("Bill Oxley"?). In an actually oppressive regime, that shit would have landed you in jail already...
While, uh, no,
regardless, that has no bearing on my point, which is that your point claiming that [it is reasonable to treat A as evidence for B, but irrational/religious to treat B as evidence for A], is entirely wrong[1].
[1](... with the possible exception of observing something which one previously had assigned a probability of zero, but, this ideally should only ever happen for things where one at least had a positive probability density, in which case a similar argument should still work. I didn't feel like working out all the details in the case of continuous probability distributions, as it is finicky and in any case is irrelevant to the discrete events you mentioned.)
I remember thinking about this recently and coming to the same conclusion[0]. If Jack Ma was supposedly disappeared and placed under arrest while also denying that he was ever placed under an official arrest then there's some background shenanigans going on by the CCP. Not to say that can't happen, just that it's not more likely than Jack Ma realizing that he poked a very vengeful bear[1] and deciding to lay low. Peng Shuai might be different (I haven't encountered information on that case recently that comes to mind) but it's fair to assume the same thing from her.
Otherwise the CCP did disappear at least one of them, which, admittedly, might happen if the appropriate decision-makers were willing to put such an operation into motion. That just doesn't really seem so significantly more likely than people choosing to retreat from the spotlight.
You can't post like this here, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules, we'd appreciate it. Note this one: "Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."
There is a large set of past explanations about why we have this rule and why it's so important. You can find many by sifting through this history, if you (or anyone) wants more: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme.... On China-related topics, which particularly give rise to this sort of attack, I put this list together for a user a couple of years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/chinamod. Nothing has changed since then.
Captured in Faisalabad, Pakistan in March 2002, al-Sharbi was transferred to Guantanamo Bay later that year. In 2006, al-Sharbi told a military commission that he was a member of al-Qaeda and proud of his actions against the United States. Serious war crimes charges were dropped against him in October 2008, as it had been found they were based on evidence gained through torture of Abu Zubaydah. Al-Sharbi had a habeas corpus petition which his father had initiated on his behalf; when it reached the court in March 2009, al-Sharbi requested that it be dismissed. He did not want to pursue it.
Al-Sharbi was held at Guantanamo for twenty years.
The rest of his wikipedia page is not particularly flattering. I don't know to what extent the quasi-justice system that applies to enemy combatants went off the rails here, but I do know that if you're being accused of waging war against the United States, maybe chanting "May God help me fight the infidels or the unfaithful ones" is a bad idea.
Say what you will, a lot of legal process (good and bad) was applied, and we're talking about a guy who sought out and attended an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan. He spent 5 years in Gitmo. This is not someone who challenged a political leader by calling him a funny name.
The word "vanished" is a massive over-dramatization.
Not defending - but you know what happened to him.
That’s the opposite of vanished.
Vanished would be things like [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_flights] where many of the victims were never recorded, and literally no one from their lives knows what happened to them - and many of the perpetrators have taken the memories to their graves, or never knew the victims names to begin with.
I thought from the quotes that you were trying to show someone who was held without trial for 20 years based on accusations extracted through torture at a black site as an example of something bad. Instead, you seem to be saying that he asked for it because he was rude. Real twist ending.
I'd say that comment goes a bit beyond rude. When you're being interrogated, even in US domestic criminal cases, the rule is "everything you say can and will be used against you". If you're suspected of giving material aid to the enemy in wartime, saying "I'm a member of al-Qaeda, I'm proud of my actions against the United States, may God help me fight the infidels" is the kind of thing that will get you convicted - of something.
Did the guy deserve to spend 20 years in Gitmo? Maybe not. But if I look into my heart of hearts, I genuinely have a tough time feeling too much sympathy. The crazy guy off his meds who points a fake gun at police officers probably didn't deserve to get shot to death either, but that's just what happens.
Note that this does not apply to US citizens. US citizens, even those accused of terrorism, still retain their legal rights under US law. That is what citizenship in any country, is.
Can those rights be violated? Yes, governments do bad things all the time. But that is not the same as a foreign national participating in Al-Qaeda training camps and meeting with Osama bin Laden. No nation on Earth has a strong history of giving full citizenship legal rights to foreign nationals and/or enemy combatants captured in a warzone.
Hicks was also returned to Australia to be dealt with by his own government, where presumably he then did retain his legal rights as a citizen of Australia. And at that point it would indeed be a violation on part of Australia if they did not treat him as any citizen of their nation should be treated.
All of that said, Guantanamo has still been a completely broken and messed up situation. We the people of the US owe it to ourselves and the rest of the world to hold our government accountable for that and not allow it to happen again.
It's just if you are wanting to say that the US treatment of it's citizens has been on par with China's treatment of it's citizens, your case may be better served by finding a more direct example.
> Can those rights be violated? Yes, governments do bad things all the time. But that is not the same as a foreign national participating in Al-Qaeda training camps and meeting with Osama bin Laden. No nation on Earth has a strong history of giving full citizenship legal rights to foreign nationals and/or enemy combatants captured in a warzone.
You're aware that the US actually kidnapped random people because they had the misfortune of using the wrong watch type or having the same name as an alleged terrorist, right? They didn't "capture enemy combatants in a warzone".
> Note that this does not apply to US citizens. US citizens, even those accused of terrorism, still retain their legal rights under US law. That is what citizenship in any country, is.
And also murdered US citizens abroad that were alleged to have ties to terrorists, without due trial.
The specific people referenced in the post I was responding to were not US citizens and should not be expected to be granted legal rights equal to US citizens.
> Hicks was captured in Afghanistan in December 2001 by the Afghan Northern Alliance
>He was captured in March 2002 by Pakistani forces during a raid at Faisalabad, Pakistan. He was held in Islamabad for two months before being turned over the United States forces.
As I said, they were captured as enemy combatants, in a warzone. The circumstances of Sharbi's capture are much more questionable. But from the US's perspective, an ally turned him over as a captured enemy combatant.
It's all questionable and stupid, of course. But the question of their status at the time is relevant to the question of whether the US "vanishes" it's own citizens. These two were not citizens, so what happened to them does not support the case that the US is just as bad as China on that point.
No nation on Earth has a history of treating such captives as full citizens entitled to the same legal rights as it's own people. But maybe that's what we all would want. That's a fair point to argue, separately.
However, that is not the point the person I was responding to was making. Which is part of why I say the examples they offered were ineffective as support for their point.
You may find it helpful to practice re-reading and making sure you understand the case a post is making before responding to it.
You and I clearly agree that what the US did in Guantanamo was bad. You and I also agree that the US can, has, and may yet still violate the rights of it's own citizens as well as the rights of people who are not it's citizens, even in situations where it has signed treaties with those people's nations.
And the US government should definitely be held accountable whenever it does something like that.
None of that changes the observation that the US's failure to give full citizen legal rights to Ghassan al Sharbi and David Matthew Hicks, people who were not US citizens, does not make a good supporting example to the case for the US being just as bad as China about "vanishing" it's own citizens.
You are, of course, free to offer concrete examples which would better make that case. That is essentially what I was opening the door for. But here you seem to be responding more to an emotion evoked by how I said something rather than the point I was actually making.
The majority of criminal cases in the USA result in a plea agreement. The majority of plea agreements take away a persons right to access to the Courts (taking away Constitutional protects. They claim that you CAN still access in certain constitutional situations but if you try both the lower court and Prosecutor will threaten you with revoking your plea if you pursue an appeal to higher courts. Source: that's how it went down in my situation). Plea agreements were unconstitutional for the majority of the existence of the USA but somehow later became constitutional (even though our system of law are required to respect precedence). While for appearance purposes some limited constitutional rights remain, for all practical purposes anyone convicted via plea has their constitutional rights to the courts removed. In addition, the Federal Court system only allows 14 days from sentencing to file an appeal. 14 days, including days being transferred from court to a Federal Detention Center to your final destination seems extremely unreasonable. Again, it was unlimited until recent history, but it was decided it needed to be 14 days for financial reasons (too many people were accessing their constitutional right to the court and clogging up the system).
Jack Ma was essentially on house arrest for over a year after flying a little too close to the sun with his IPO plans. Peng Shuai was on house arrest for denouncing sexual abuse by a CCP member.
The psychological, widespread chilling effects of these high profile "vanishings" has absolutely no commonality with the Patriot act (bad as it is).