Agree. I'm tired of having to do research every time I read a news article. If you want me to trust your news articles give me raw unedited sources, because if I don't see any, I don't trust your assessment.

> It sounds like this was mainly being used to report abuses by US allies

The website is for reporting abuses by foreign forces armed with US kit. The US isn't in the habit of arming its enemies, so of course the reports concern allies. That's what the website is for.

Seems premature to accuse the article if being inaccurate or biased without actually knowing whether it's inaccurate or biased.

I’m concerned about human rights, but I’m equally concerned about yellow journalism or coordinated media bias.

I'm equally concerned about people being paid to push narratives in places like Hacker News. Especially in defense of large organizations.

It would still be roughly true that someone is trying to make it harder to report abuses or that they’re achieving the same by incompetence, no?

It's hard to say whether the article is lazy or is actually just partisan.

>Obviously there is something more to this than the headline and tone of the piece indicate.

So... what is that something? Did you find out or is the article not actually using the wrong "tone" and is in fact just reporting what happened?

>so how can removing the site make it impossible to abide by the law?

Did you find what the replacement for this service is? Has the government actually provided one? Did you read the law?

i was with you until:

> journalists like Glen Greenwald and outlets like Wikileaks who are reliably independent.

independent from whom?

Define “easier.”

Someone has to read through each email to determine the nature of the complaint, who was involved, how to classify it, etc.

If the web form was free text entry, the same effort is required by the receiving humans.

You can move the effort slider from the reviewer toward the web dev and the reporter by designing a UI to limit input and pre-classify the complaint.

So who has it “easier” now? I guess the server admin?

> I would think email is a lot easier than a webform.

why

I might be wrong but I guess it might also be easier for leadership to put pressure and influence personal communications than to avoid processing official reportings from their own website. An article reading "they ignored emails from amnesty international" sounds different from "they are not acting on this report made on their official website"

> The Leahy Law requires the U.S. government to facilitate receipt of information about alleged abuses by U.S. supported forces.

From Wikipedia: "Senator Leahy first introduced this law in 1997 as part of the Foreign Operations Appropriations Act."

It is funny that only today they found it. Wikileaks was documenting American war crimes since some time.

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.

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".

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Laws can’t fix this problem. The branches check each other but citizens are supposed to check the branches. “Can’t fix a non-engineering problem with engineering.”

But your average citizen is consuming news sources like Fox News that present a rosy picture. In their world, things are going well (and all problems are due to one party).

That’s why dysfunction in the branches can go so far. The basis of American governance, and probably any kind of governance to be honest, is vigilance. If everyone was fully informed on what was happening everyday and behind closed doors, everyone would vote differently.

Instead we vote based often on out-of-context bits that we hear, and surprisingly we all get completely sets of bits. The system — voting, checks and balances — is still solid but the input into it is not great.

The founding fathers did not anticipate the modern media world.

TBH The Right in the US has such a structural advantage, that Congress's silence becomes de-facto acceptance. Congress choosing to not do oversight becomes a de-facto repeal of the law.

The only other option is to find someone with standing being harmed and sue. And that will take time to wind through the courts, with not great chances at SCOTUS.

Your comment reflects a common, but fundamentally mistaken, understanding of the constitution. You're thinking of the government like an operating system with a microkernel that is trusted to neutrally enforce the "law," with the three branches of government running in userspace.

That's not the system the founders created! They understood that everyone is political, and no one can be trusted. The founders understood the "who watches the watchers" problem and created a system without any such single point of failure. The ultimate backstop in our political system is not the law, but instead frequent elections. Congress writes the law, the President enforces the law, and the Judiciary interprets the law. If the President does a bad job of enforcing the law, the recourse is elections (or, as a last resort, impeachment).

> 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.

When a different side takes control of the justice department they may choose to go after all those who broke the law by order of this president. The president might be protected from consequences according to the supreme court, but those answering to the president are not.

This administration has set the standard that the justice department can be weaponized against political enemies. The ratchet only goes one way in American politics, presidents never relinquish the powers claimed by their predecessors.

It defeats the purpose of a veto if the executive branch can ignore the law.

People have been saying for decades that Congress has delegated far too much power to the executive and that it's ripe for abuse if a malevolent president ever takes office.

Hey guess what, a malevolent president took office and is now abusing all that power delegated by Congress. Who could have foreseen this.

(Yes, his predecessors also abused that power in various malevolent ways, but there's a massive difference in degree now.)

I am so mad that I spent that much time watching an anthropomorphized bill moving through congress. Useless knowledge.

“And we’ll make ted kennedy payyyy

“If he fights back, we’ll just say that he’s gayyyy

> there aren't really any laws constraining the executive branch.

Laws don't do things, people do.

It doesn't matter what's written down on paper if the people in power ignore it and the masses don't have enough organized collective power to prevent them from doing so.

The context of all US law is that it is the implementation of the will of the people. There is currently political will to shift focus in the military to effective fighting power, as opposed to progressive values. I think this is because the electorate recognizes that military threats around the world are getting worse.

Ukrainians will tell you now, you can’t have peace without strength. Europeans are also beginning to realize this due to American leadership, hence they have all (but one) doubled NATO funding limits this year.

This is not a reply to your message, but I can’t help but dive in to this opportunity to be extremely pedantic.

Is the correct plural acronym here “IGs”, or “Is-G” (Inspectors General)?

It will always boil down to people.

This fantasy of free markets, laws, branches or anything else solving what Plato wrote about in The Republic thousands of years ago is pure folly.

If it is of any comfort - it's always been this way and it's not going to get any better :) We have technological progress, not progress in wisdom. People are better behaved because well fed humans behave better than hungry humans - everything else is as it's always been.

The Constitution constrains the executive, it doesn't give him very many powers at all. Frankly, the Constitution bars him from having run in the 2024 election for having caused an insurrection against the United States. Aside from that, he should have been impeached and removed and barred from running again for extorting a bribe from a foreign government.

We have the necessary laws to have prevented this but money and power and bigotry won the day, as usual. Don't look to laws to fix this, no amount of laws will fix voting in a felon, adjudicated rapist who tried to kill his own VP. At that point you have to fix the society, because it's sick.

The answer is impeachment, but when Congress is stuffed with boot licking toadies, then there is no recourse.

A very, very bad place indeed.

Do you expect elections are still a viable option in this circumstance? It's beginning to sound like the results will be just set to a default, like the last presidential election in Russia: "78%+ for Putin/Trump".

it turns out there aren't really any laws

> ...it turns out there aren't really any laws constraining the executive branch.

There are, but the executive for decades (centuries?) has ignored law inconvenient to its goals, and the legislative has generally shrugged it off, hoping their guy will do the same down the road.

One such restraint? Declaring war. Yet how often has this power been abused by the executive since World War 2? Korea anyone? Vietnam? Central America? The Middle East?

There's been a lot of hand-wringing in this thread about what Trump has done and is doing. Truth is, he's just the latest player in the game we've all participated in, and he's good at it.

To stop him, we'd have to change the rules of the game, as Congress did in 2017 with the Russia sanctions bill.[1] I just don't see that happening 'cause... we're all hoping our guy will do the same (as Trump) down the road.

[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countering_America%27s_Adversa...>

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I don't see how anything has changed in a meaningful way. George Bush "tortured some folks" and Obama assassinated US citizens abroad. The status quo is literal evil and Trump is behaving in accordance with the status quo.

Seems like laws exist, they're just perverted or ignored. For example, this applies to the executive branch:

(a)Except as otherwise provided in this section, whoever, in any matter within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative, or judicial branch of the Government of the United States, knowingly and willfully— (1)falsifies, conceals, or covers up by any trick, scheme, or device a material fact; (2)makes any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation; or (3)makes or uses any false writing or document knowing the same to contain any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or entry; shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 5 years or, if the offense involves international or domestic terrorism (as defined in section 2331), imprisoned not more than 8 years, or both. If the matter relates to an offense under chapter 109A, 109B, 110, or 117, or section 1591, then the term of imprisonment imposed under this section shall be not more than 8 years. (b)Subsection (a) does not apply to a party to a judicial proceeding, or that party’s counsel, for statements, representations, writings or documents submitted by such party or counsel to a judge or magistrate in that proceeding. (c)With respect to any matter within the jurisdiction of the legislative branch, subsection (a) shall apply only to— (1)administrative matters, including a claim for payment, a matter related to the procurement of property or services, personnel or employment practices, or support services, or a document required by law, rule, or regulation to be submitted to the Congress or any office or officer within the legislative branch; or (2)any investigation or review, conducted pursuant to the authority of any committee, subcommittee, commission or office of the Congress, consistent with applicable rules of the House or Senate. (June 25, 1948, ch. 645, 62 Stat. 749; Pub. L. 103–322, title XXXIII, § 330016(1)(L), Sept. 13, 1994, 108 Stat. 2147; Pub. L. 104–292, § 2, Oct. 11, 1996, 110 Stat. 3459; Pub. L. 108–458, title VI, § 6703(a), Dec. 17, 2004, 118 Stat. 3766; Pub. L. 109–248, title I, § 141(c), July 27, 2006, 120 Stat. 603.)

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1001

That’s next:

https://www.democracynow.org/2025/9/22/headlines/trump_says_...

> Trump Says It Is “Really Illegal” for Journalists to Give His Administration Negative Coverage

https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/really-i...

> The president concluded that when coverage of someone is “bad” 97% of the time, “that’s no longer free speech.”

> “They’ll take a great story and they’ll make it bad,” he told reporters, referring to media outlets. “See, I think that’s really illegal.”

Certainly! No more complaints! See how great we are!

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Indeed, the recent trend of the US government itself posting videos of the drone murders of Venezuelans stands in real stark contrast to how that was handled just 15 years ago.

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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.

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".

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.

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

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.

I concur, Trumps motivation is easy. That of his voters, not so much. They knew what they would get; it was on plain display for them to see.

Every single last one of them is guilty of everything that happened and will happen.

I hope that we never have to find out how ferocious the quiet, "leave me alone", armed populous is. I feel we are on that path and grouping people as the other just fuels the fire.

and why was the comment downvoted :shrug:

Least they could do is tell us about the tech stack for the website.

technically it's about a website

> If this is such a crisis, then go judge shopping and get an injunction.

So the supreme court can issue a shadow docket ruling a week later, with zero rationalization or justification, staying the injunction?

The US Government has never cared about human rights. It's always been used as a weapon to flog enemies. Allies like Israel can do whatever they like.

Perception is reality. If there is at least a pretense of caring about human rights, then there is some modicum of shame upon leadership in not living up to them. And even if the desire was fake, creating a website to "tell us when we are being evil" is real. Pulling off the mask and showing the "true self", which is what the Trump administration is doing (and far more than that, I should add. It is only showing the "true self" of a subset of the population), is removing not only the potential for shame, but also accountability. I don't have to believe that America is/was a flawless champion of human rights to believe that it is much, much worse now.

And it was always purely a pretense.

One must laud the transparency this administration has introduced.

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That's basically what happened, we're heading that way fast. The fact that leaving the country crosses my mind is a good sign

Make HN Comments Great Again

While Israel has outsized influence over the US, it's more like they (ab-)use each other.

Careful, that’s the kind of comment that makes these posts suddenly “off topic for HN”

"subversive forces"

The US commits human rights abuses constantly. The public should know. The US has no business being on a human rights committee quite frankly. We just committed genocide in Palestine.

What’s wrong with being a subversive force?

So many that you can't take a moment to identify a few?

Does this news not make you frown? I wonder what level of censorship would it take for some people to stop and ask questions.

It’s not exactly working when the executive seizes two core powers of Congress (taxation and spending) and gets away with it for, so far, most of a year, with no end in sight.

There’s a difference between disagreement over reasonable interpretations and some of a handful of key passages in the country’s highest law simply being ignored, for months on end (this aside from entirely unambiguous ordinary laws being ignored left and right, like e.g. firing all the inspectors general without the required notice period). That’s not “democracy working”, it’s rule of law, and democracy, breaking. Democracies are routinely ended by people who were elected, the fact that people won elections doesn’t mean that the results are functioning democracy.

A functioning democratic republic is not, in fact, predicated on voting every couple years and shutting up in between elections.

Additionally, checks and balances abdicating their duties to uphold laws does not mean that no laws are being broken and all is well: it's a symptom of the system as a whole grinding itself apart under the internal contradictions.

Too bad you're getting down voted because you're correct that congress is where the problem is. They could stop most of what he's doing, but choose not to.

But "Every check and balance is working" is clearly wrong.

You are mostly correct in my opinion.

The fundamental problem is, there is really no "free market" of countries.

A US citizen who hates what the country has become cannot go off and set up a new one, they have a choice of a few styles of government (and it is very expensive to go and try living under another government!) Perhaps a benefit of space exploration will be experimentation with style of government.

My only niggle with your statement would be: A lot of what is happening now is happening because of "friction" in the system. If, for example, in an ideal world courts adjudicated instantly (instead of taking months or years) the current situation would be quite different. Similarly, if all congress people voted without fear of intimidation, some might vote quite differently. But, you are right, it's not like the founders didn't know that courts are slow or people can be intimidated.

Germany 1933 is also what democracy looks like. Just because the system allows it to happen doesn't mean everyone is doing their job or that the result is in any way acceptable.

"Checks and balances" was predicated on each part of government jealously guarding their power. Congress and the Supreme Court are both giving up vast amounts of their power to the executive, out of party loyalty or cowardice or just a belief that the executive should have unchecked power. This is not what working checks and balances look like.

How do you explain away things like lobbying money (i.e. bribery), or politicians remaining in their post despite glaringly obvious physical and cognitive decline, or insider trading, or the stacking of courts with biased judges, or total lack of enforcement of the law, or the media being so obviously controlled by state-aligned actors? To name but a few.

The president has a mob of violent supporters, and Congress is terrified for their lives to take a stand against the president. When Republicans in congress have gone against Trump even in the smallest way, all he has to do is tweet something negative about them, and they are inundated with hundreds of death threats against their families [1]. Unless they can coordinate enough to rebel all together with loyalists somehow not finding out first, taking a stand would be suicide.

As a much lesser, but still serious point- Trump individually has so much power within the party he can get anyone removed from the party itself with a word, and effectively take away all of their campaign funding. He personally decides who is allowed to run or not run for office in the Republican party.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/27/republicans-...

> Every check and balance is working its just not making decisions the left agrees with. This is indeed what democracy looks like though. Mid terms are coming up and the people will once again have a chance to voice their opinion.

The Republican Party acts like the midterms don't matter at all.

Approval is plummeting, representatives ignore townhalls like the plague.

> Fact is he was democratically elected

Mussolini was democratically elected; the Nazis were democratically elected; Caesar was elected; Putin was elected. Currently 56 out of 91 autocracies are electoral autocracies. Being democratically elected is in no way a counterargument against someone being an autocrat, or working to become one.

You are coming to a wrong conclusion due to a misunderstanding of what the separation of powers means. I will first try to illustrate with a thought experiment, after which I believe you will agree that there is something wrong in your reasoning, and then I will demonstrate where your logic went wrong.

---

Thought experiment: Suppose a dear loved one is brutally murdered by a relative of the current democratically elected leader (imagine a hypothetical leader, country, etc). Through various extralegal manipulations, the leader ensures that the murderer is not convicted (evidence disappears, jurors are appointed in a fishy way, the judge turns out to be a family member of the murderer, ...) and you notice that none of the usual paths of recourse work. Perhaps you go to the press, but his supporters just dismiss this as a smear campaign. Crucially, this leader is very popular, their party controls the legislative and has appointed judges for years.

Following the reasoning in your post, which I think can be summarized as "the legislative and judicial branches, which are legitimately elected/appointed, chose not to stop him, therefore the separation of powers is not violated and this is how a democracy is supposed to work", the leader's actions do not constitute a violation of the separation of powers, and this incident does not demonstrate that this country's democracy is unhealthy.

---

I hope you agree that this conclusion is wrong, yet it follows inexorably from the argument you have made (because the sole precondition, that the other branches are legitimately elected/appointed, is satisfied). So we must conclude that there is a mistake in your argument, and I think it originates in the conflation of two of the core features of liberal democracy -- that is (a) leaders are elected and (b) there is a separation of powers. You are essentially saying that (b) holds because (a) holds, but it is important to remember that (a) and (b)are independent features that sometimes oppose each other: it is by design that the system (especially the judiciary) can overrule the majority of the population, at least for some time.

So the question of "are the judiciary and legislative branches effectively enforcing the separation of powers" is not actually related to whether these branches are legitimately appointed/elected, but to whether they are independent. By this I mean that they play their constitutionally prescribed role even if at times this is unpopular. For example, the judiciary's job is to enforce the law. In the thought experiment, they are not independent from the executive, and that is a deep system failure: they should enforce the law (convict the murderer) even if the (popular and legitimate) executive disagrees.

For example, the law is crystal clear wrt who has the authority to enact tariffs on foreign nations. The President cannot legally do this as the Constitution vests the power to raise taxes in Congress; reasonable people cannot disagree about this. Congress has granted him emergency powers on the basis of a fentanyl crisis at the Mexican border; the scope of these emergency powers clearly does not include imposing tariffs on, say, Australia. Again, there is no room for interpretation here, this is all crystal clear. The fact that the tariffs haven't been effectively struck down yet is a clear failure of the separation of powers, because the law is so clear. The popularity of the president or his policy is completely irrelevant to the question of whether he should be stopped by the courts.

The main reason this needs to exist is to make sure that, indeed, the next election is a free and fair election. If the separation of powers does not hold, then there is nothing stopping the executive from manipulating the election and hollowing out democracy. This has happened many times in history, and it is exactly what people (rightfully, I believe) fear about the Trump presidency.

I'm actually more surprised that they didn't abuse it, instead of removing it. Remember when Trump's first FCC commissioner ran a public comment campaign on net neutrality, and then heavily botted it to make it look like people were more strongly opposed than they actually were? Remember when there were zero consequences for that? I guess removing it makes a stronger statement.