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

This seems like a bad decision to me. Not only does it seem not to be in the spirit of the law (you can still report but not as easily now) but it's not clear why they shut it down at all. Cost? Inefficiency? Just wasn't getting used much? They have a better solution?

On the other hand, the US seems so partisan now that had the current administration told the world they were taking huma' rights abuse reporting seriously by creating a web form, some people would probably be criticized for that, too.

Does Israel not commit human rights abuses?

That’s not a guess, it’s a whole-ass story you’ve concocted in your head.

> got overlooked by DOGE

DOGE had no accountability. Of course they did nothing.

First off even if it was 99% unfounded Israel complaints, that's not a reason to axe it, that's just a reason to add a filter in an excel spreadsheet. But more importantly, we are absolutely responsible for making sure that our military aid is used in a way that supports our interests and values.

Hegseth is publicly just a huge fan of war crimes and this is probably the main reason he got the job he has now. The big thing he's been signaling, and not really even in a sly or dogwhistly way, is that war crimes are ok to do now.

If your goal is to do war crimes and enable others to do war crimes then removing the war crime reporting tool may not directly benefit you much but it certainly doesn't hurt you. And there is a certain idealogical alignment.

> Just a guess but probably 99% of complaints were against israel

That would make sense, but maybe not for the reason you think.

I highly doubt Putin is concerned with the aesthetics of the White House

Crazy that so many seem to be so against remodeling the whitehouse.

the man cheats in the olympics, he's exactly petty enough to care

Deflection at its finest.

At least as a thought exercise, consider the possibility that the US administration was _always not great_ on its own merits, not as the fault of whatever foreign boogeyman-of-the-day.

It seems to be an extension of aspects that he talked about in his speech https://www.war.gov/News/Transcripts/Transcript/Article/4318... Specifically:

> allow me a few words to talk about toxic leaders. > The definition of toxic has been turned upside down, and we're correcting that. That's why today, at my direction we're undertaking a full review of the department's definitions of so-called toxic leadership, bullying and hazing, to empower leaders to enforce standards without fear of retribution or second guessing. > We're talking about words like bullying and hazing and toxic. They've been weaponized and bastardized inside our formations, undercutting commanders and NCOs. No more.

> Third, we are attacking and ending the walking on eggshells and zero defect command culture. > A blemish free record is what peacetime leaders covet the most, which is the worst of all incentives. You, we as senior leaders, need to end the poisonous culture of risk aversion and empower our NCOs at all levels to enforce standards. > I call it the no more walking on eggshells policy. We are liberating commanders and NCOs. We are liberating you. We are overhauling an inspector general process, the IG, that has been weaponized, putting complainers, ideologues and poor performers in the driver's seat.

> No more frivolous complaints. No more anonymous complaints. No more repeat complainants. No more smearing reputations. No more endless waiting. No more legal limbo. No more sidetracking careers. No more walking on eggshells.

> we know mistakes will be made. It's the nature of leadership. But you should not pay for earnest mistakes for your entire career. And that's why today, at my direction, we're making changes to the retention of adverse information on personnel records that will allow leaders with forgivable earnest or minor infractions to not be encumbered by those infractions in perpetuity.

> People make honest mistakes, and our mistakes should not define an entire career. Otherwise, we only try not to make mistakes, and that's not the business we're in. We need risk takers and aggressive leaders and a culture that supports you.

That makes his view of complaints, and his preference that people "take risks" and don't worry about "not being perfect", pretty clear. He thinks those things are "debris" that have been "weaponized" and that he's "liberating" people from. Maybe that seems great if you're in the military. Not so great if you're on the receiving end of those "risks", or if you or your family becomes the broken "eggshells".

No. not on any organised national level.

you must "hate" Amy Edmondson

How cute! You know the lingo!

To be fair (ignoring whether Hegseth really deserves that), what he describes is a very common view of military leadership during war time.

"War time" is the key there though. The US is not a nation at war. We have allies at war and the executive branch has taken it upon itself to take warlike actions without Congress, but we aren't st war - especially not a war the scale of which is seen as existential and leads to these kind of views on conduct and policy.

Hegseth seems to be playing out what Eisenhower tried to warn us about decades ago. When a wartime general turned President leaves office with a final warning of the dangers of the new military industrial complex, everyone should listen.

The most polite thing i can say about Pete is that he's the dimmest bulb among them, trying to imitate much more capable people. And everyone can see it.

He's broken the Peter Principle by shooting far above the level of his incompetence.

If the war is prolonged, you can't go around treating people like eggshells to be crushed, or morale will suffer.

Unless your target image is how Russia conducts war. Beats (their own) soldiers, puts them in cages, ties them to trees for days, and so on. In Ukraine we see the difference in practice. If the cause is just, you don't have push your soldiers at gunpoint into the fray, like Russia does.

And if the war is not prolonged, what's even the excuse to do that in the first place?

Any large standing military will typically oscillate between a wartime footing where aggression and risk-taking are rewarded versus a peacetime (garrison) footing where avoiding politically embarrassing mistakes is rewarded. The problem is that when the next war starts the careerist officers who were promoted during peacetime produce disastrous results. It then takes several lost battles until they are replaced with competent warfighters.

For better or worse, US leadership is now attempting to place the military on a permanent wartime footing, largely on the theory that a major regional conflict with China is coming at some unpredictable time in the next couple decades. They think they're going to have to fight WWII again with China now playing the role of Japan. Some level of occasional human rights abuses are seen as an acceptable "cost of doing business" to maintain a higher level of readiness and combat effectiveness. (I am not claiming that this is a good policy, just trying to explain the current thinking within the military-industrial complex.)

I agree with you here, that maps to my understanding of what they're intending to do as well.

I'm of the opinion that standing militaries are almost never justifiable at scale. A country may need a skeleton crew keeping some semblance of military infrastructure functional, but we should never need a military scaled up for a fight during peacetime.

We need a populace that is healthy and skilled enough to enlist with basic training should a war break out. We don't need to fully arm up and constantly be on the lookout for war.

You're right to be skeptical of "boogeyman" narratives. The baseline should be that US administrations can be flawed on their own merits.

The problem is that the "flawed" hypothesis fails to explain the specific vector of these anomalies. This isn't random incompetence; it's a persistent, multi-year pattern of actions that consistently align with the strategic goals of a single US adversary.

This pattern required him to systematically fire or purge officials who represented traditional US security policy (Mattis, McMaster, Bolton, Tillerson) and replace them with those who would enact this new vector (Vance, Kellogg).

The "ordinary incompetence" model must be able to explain the following data points, not as isolated gaffes, but as a cohesive pattern where his actions were in direct opposition to bipartisan congressional consensus and the US national security establishment:

Publicly inviting Russian interference ("Russia, if you're listening...").

Campaign chair (Manafort) providing internal polling data and strategy to a known Russian intelligence agent (Kilimnik).

Actively pursuing a Trump Tower Moscow deal during the campaign while lying to the public about it.

Softening the 2016 GOP platform to remove "lethal defensive weapons" for Ukraine.

Publicly siding with Putin in Helsinki over the entire US intelligence community.

Disclosing highly-classified, "code-word" intelligence from a key ally to the Russian FM and Ambassador in the Oval Office.

Illegally withholding $391M in congressionally-mandated military aid from Ukraine to extort a political investigation.

Waging a tariff war against allies (EU, Canada), creating a transatlantic rift that primarily benefited Moscow.

Unilaterally withdrawing from the INF and Open Skies Treaties, key arms-control pacts that constrained Russia, against the advice of allies and security officials.

Publicly stating he would "encourage" Russia "to do whatever the hell they want" to any NATO ally he deems "delinquent."

Dangling the prospect of critical Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine, only to publicly snatch the offer away immediately after a phone call with Putin.

Pausing vital US intelligence sharing with Ukraine, a move that directly aided Russia's successful offensive in the Kursk region and retaking it.

Publicly demanding that Ukraine "cut up" its territory and "stop at the battle lines," an act that validates Russia's invasion.

Consistently laundering Kremlin disinformation from the White House itself (e.g., CrowdStrike, "biolabs," "Nazis" in Kyiv).

One or two of these is a blunder. A list this long (and incomplete), spanning campaign, business, diplomacy, intelligence, and military policy, where every single item provides a direct, tangible benefit to the Kremlin, is a data cluster that requires a better explanation.

The choice isn't "great vs. not great." It's "random incompetence" vs. a coherent, multi-year vector of pro-Moscow actions that required a complete hostile takeover of his own party and the executive branch.

I'm not arguing that it is a "good" or "right" way to approach war, only that the mindset is common among the military when fighting a war they believe to be an existential fight.

That's a quaint idea but the notion of having a small cadre of experienced professional personnel who could rapidly train up new recruits in wartime stopped being relevant in the 1980s. The complexity of equipment and doctrine has increased so much that it now takes years to train people. Too long to wait in a crisis.

Its into quaint, there have been plenty of times in history where countries either (a) didn't exist as they do today or (b) didn't have standing militaries.

The standing military the US maintains today only dates back to WWII, and is exactly what Eisenhower was warning us against.

Equipment complexity is theoretical at best. I'm not aware of a war between comparable militaries since WWII. My expectation is that if or when that happens, equipment ceases being the determining factor pretty quickly in favor of boots on the ground and logistics. History, at least, supports those being the deciding factors.

You're technically correct, though arguably the situation is much worse than "war time". Due to the US having ushered in a "time" of lawlessness such legal discrepancies as war and peace have very little meaning.