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

(www.bbc.com)
763 points tartoran | 4 comments | 23 Oct 25 14:25 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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mikeyouse ◴[23 Oct 25 14:35 UTC] No.45682307[source]▶
> Tim Rieser, former senior aide to Senator Leahy who wrote the 2011 amendment mandating information gathering, told the BBC the gateway's removal meant the State Department was "clearly ignoring the law".

We're in a really bad place... with a servile congress, it turns out there aren't really any laws constraining the executive branch. When everything relies on "independent IGs" for law enforcement inside executive branch departments, and the President can fire them all without consequence or oversight, then it turns out there is no law.

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skizm ◴[23 Oct 25 14:52 UTC] No.45682511[source]▶
> it turns out there aren't really any laws constraining the executive branch

There are plenty of laws being ignored. Tariffs being the most obvious.

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selectodude ◴[23 Oct 25 15:16 UTC] No.45682818[source]▶
Congress should get around to impeaching and convicting the president then!
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cheema33 ◴[23 Oct 25 15:21 UTC] No.45682889[source]▶
> Congress should get around to impeaching and convicting the president then!

I hope you know that Congress has abdicated all of their responsibilities to the president. I don't know if the founders ever saw this coming.

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candiddevmike ◴[23 Oct 25 15:30 UTC] No.45683006{3}[source]▶
> I don't know if the founders ever saw this coming.

Surely there weren't any historical examples of that happening, like in the Mediterranean...

I kinda dislike how folks hold the founders up with some kind of religious reverence (for some, only when it suits their agenda). These guys may have been bright at the time, but you can tell they didn't think a lot of things through and certainly didn't "plan for scale". That we now have judges acting as pseudo priests "interpreting the founders" is just laughable, I doubt the founders envisioned their constitution still being in use 300+ years later.

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1. rayiner ◴[23 Oct 25 15:46 UTC] No.45683223{4}[source]▶
The founders came from England, which has the world's longest unbroken political tradition (apart from 11 years during the English Civil War). England has top-level cabinet positions that were established 800 years ago. So I doubt the founders would be surprised that their constitution was still in use 236 years later.

Regardless, what the founders believed is relevant because they're the ones that wrote the currently operative legal document that governs the country. We can replace that document whenever we want! But until we do that, the document, and what its authors intended it to mean, are binding on us.

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2. mongol ◴[23 Oct 25 16:18 UTC] No.45683666[source]▶
Is it really longer than the Catholic church?
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3. rayiner ◴[23 Oct 25 16:36 UTC] No.45683905[source]▶
Fair point.
4. kridsdale1 ◴[23 Oct 25 16:53 UTC] No.45684096[source]▶
Along this line of thinking, surely there’s an unbroken administrative / bureaucratic tradition running China that spans multiple royal dynasties and perhaps even the recent ideological upheaval. Can we call that an enduring government?