US axes website for reporting human rights abuses by US-armed foreign forces

Not that I agree with this decision, but is there any evidence that these reports yielded any consequences? Or rather, was it one of those, "After conducting an internal investigation, we have determined we did nothing wrong" kind of things?

Yes, I would think the 'smart evil' thing to do would be keeping it running and just ignoring what you don't like but now people will just send the stuff to WikiLeaks.

It reminds me of a company I used to work for that had a "suggestions box." After the box was full enough, the leadership would just dump it in the trash. Leadership didn't care about employee nor customer opinions. It was just to give people the illusion that their opinion mattered just to placate them.

I have a feeling thats exactly how it was used. But that makes its removal even more odd. The hosting cost must be trivial; an email support form connected to a shredder.

Defund the organization in charge of checking and follow-ups is one thing, but its complete removal just smell of incompetence or acknowledging of wrongdoing, or some sort of performance.

And the response is also baffling. "sorry we migrated it systems and accidentally took it down" is the handwave i expected. not "we follow the law regardless so it's not needed".

They wouldn’t send to WikiLeaks before - also, or instead?

Do we have any evidence this initiative was ever staffed and effective?

We’ve extended a lot of credit to a vested institution to police itself. That’s not worked out in other matters, such as warrantless wiretapping, so why do you think this is effective here?

And why would you discredit third parties - especially those designed to be watchdogs?

I can see this initiative being an embrace, extend, extinguish strategy. And, I’d imagine closing this reporting portal won’t deter journalists - especially those on the frontline like WikiLeaks - from reporting on incidents.

Yeah, absolutely.

I obviously do not condone the behavior of taking down such a website. I truly wish such reports were taking with the utmost severity.

As evidence, look what happened to those that were involved in the violation of human rights in Abu Ghraib Prision [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisone...

I don't think that's even the smart thing. Because this is set up to receive reports about acts committed by groups receiving weapons from the US, the smart evil thing is to have dossiers of all the human rights abuses of your client states ready the next time you want to negotiate something with them. "It's highly embarrassing that you used the guns we gave you to shoot so many civilians. We might be somewhat less embarrassed to continue supplying you with guns if (your national airline bought more Boeing planes|you sung praises to our glorious leader more loudly in public|you brought a complaint against our adversary in the WTO)."

Guessing some mid level functionary had to come up with 3 things to do that week and this is an easy bullet point. Saying "Actually we should keep this thing because we're playing 4D chess" doesn't look good on such a status report.

It’s not odd though. This administration has been very clear that they think things like rules of engagement or caring about collateral damage are bullshit.

On a weekly basis now, they are blowing up civilian boats without any evidence wrong doing. Even if they had evidence, it still wouldn’t warrant using hellfire missiles on civilian ships, especially when the U.S. navy or coastguard is more than capable of intercept these ships.

Or it gives you a nice warning about the evil things that have been discovered and its time to ramp up the psyops machine to cover it up...

Even if the reports didn’t result in action, they would (in theory) leave a report trail that a FOI request could uncover.

There’s a lot of ifs in there though, and a lot of implied honesty just for record keeping. We’re all discovering (again) that implied honesty in governance will always be abused.

My guess is that it's part of the whole "department of war" rebranding. War is hell, toughen up!

And someone out there is cheering for this, I'm sure.

Vice signalling

I'm not sure that holds up. Because whats written in the status report is the title of this article. And thats not a good looking status report.

This week we took down the "Warcrime report form" because its hosting costs the same as the office coffee machine maintenance.

.. oo gee, mabie that one sounds a bit important. perhaps I should leave that running.

There's some cases described below. Clearly, it doesn't help much. But, better to enforce that scrap it IMHO,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leahy_Law

Not just out there. Right here, plenty.

I don't think they understand the wave of regulation through constitutional amendment that's coming.

After the small-ish company I worked for was bought by $ENGINEERING_MEGACORP, an integration program was promptly launched, during which numerous committees were formed to evaluate all business processes and take the best parts of both companies' DNA.

After thorough evaluation, it so happened that the existing practices of the megacorp was adopted without any modifications.

The next day, the office shredder had been labelled 'Suggestion box'.

Poor sods from head office tried to remove the sign, only to find some miscreant had mixed glass dust in the glue used to affix the nicely engraved sign onto the shredder, making removing it kind of difficult. End result being we got a new shredder.

The spare sign which was engraved just in case now adorns the outhouse at my cottage in the woods.

Trump has personally pardoned several known American war criminals. Not people who got caught up in a bad situation, but people who murdered non-combatants for fun

The Trump admin is demonstrably pro-warcrime.

Of course not, but US imperialism is a bipartisan issue, what Trump does is remove the pretense that makes liberals sleep better at night. I think it's good that they removed it, let's get rid of all the lies and hypocrisy. Nothing material changes, it just makes it harder for democrats to pretend it's about something other than violent neocolonialism and might is right foreign policy they have been complicit in for decades.

Oh I'm using that.