A former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) software engineer who was convicted for carrying out the largest theft of classified information in the agency’s history and of charges related to child abuse imagery was sentenced to 40 years in prison on Thursday.
The 40-year sentence by US district judge Jesse Furman was for “crimes of espionage, computer hacking, contempt of court, making false statements to the FBI, and child pornography”, federal prosecutors said in a statement. The judge did not impose a life sentence as sought by prosecutors.
Joshua Schulte was convicted in July 2022 on four counts each of espionage and computer hacking and one count of lying to FBI agents, after giving classified materials to the whistleblowing agency WikiLeaks in the so-called Vault 7 leak. Last August, a judge mostly upheld the conviction.
Sure, but the fact that there are more people in US prisons than in Stalin’s gulags should tell you something about America.
Now let me clarify something. The Russian Federation didn’t exist before the USSR fell, so we can only really talk about the period from 1991. That’s the “selective time range” I’m using. When I say America is the worst on Earth, I’m saying it’s currently the worst on Earth.
I’m not talking about countries that don’t exist anymore. You’re the one that brought gulags up, I just wanted to mention a disturbing fact about America’s carceral system. This doesn’t even get into the history of chattel slavery and the genocide of the Native Americans, this is just about the fact that modern America has the worst prisoner-per-capita ratio on Earth and also the largest prisoner population on Earth. Worse than Russia, worse than China, the worst.
US prisons are torture centers where people get raped and murdered all the time, are used for extremely cheap slave-like labor, and have mass graves like the 215 people have been buried behind a Mississippi jail since 2016. US prisons are comparable to gulags and in some cases worse.
Now globally I imagine there might be worse prisons today, so I won’t say that US has the worst prisons on Earth. They’re pretty fucking bad, though, and when combined with having the highest prisoner-per-capita ratio and highest number of prisoners its a monument to human suffering that is unparalleled in the modern world.
That’s just wrong. The Great Purges may have seen 750,000 executions. That was certainly excessive, not something I’m defending, and that’s literally not genocide. He didn’t target an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group. He killed perceived enemies of his state and he did so along class and political lines.
The War on Terror is estimated to have caused 4.5 million excess deaths.
Now, maybe it was unfair of me to bring up Operation Condor & the Dirty Wars (60,000–80,000 deaths in Central and South America) and Jakarta (between 100,000 and 1,000,000 deaths in Indonesia) because those were before the Russian Federation even existed. I just finished reading The Jakarta Method and it was on my mind, I shouldn’t have let that distract me from my point. Apologies.
And that’s not good!
Its not like protesters haven’t been assaulted and arrested by cops in the US since before our parents were born, and I can point out that the US is trying to extradite Julian Assange for doing journalism and prosecuting the Cop City protesters on RICO charges, but you’re right that Russia is still definitely worse on this front. I think the mass incarceration and global imperialism are worse problems.
Pretty sure you lose on the numbers. Severity is arguable, but I think quantity is a quality all on its own.
I’ll first open by noting that you had no problem referring back to Stalin when you thought it benefitted your argument, or referring to conflicts by the US outside the original date range. When it turns out it really didn’t and you realize that accepting those dates would be utterly impossible to defend in the broader scope of corruption and murder, you quickly changed your tune – and as I predicted – opted for a narrow date range under some excuse (which I’ll get into further below).
Second, true the Russian Federation isn’t the same as the USSR, but that would be like deciding to remove the Civil War from the domain of US History because the Confederacy no longer exists. Simply absurd. Moreover considering that Putin has openly waxed poetry about the USSR and Russian Empire and transitioning back to what he perceives as the golden age, well, I think it’s perfectly valid to bring up the Stalin era. The gulags for all intents still exist. The same building the KGB operated with torture chambers is still run by the FSB. The seat of government still resides at the Kremlin, does it not? Hell, is Putin who was a strong proponent of the USSR and active KGB agent at the time now not the exact same person in power over said region and who advocates for the original territory the USSR once held dominion over?
I don’t feel it can tell much of anything, honestly. Again, because you’re not taking proportionality into account, let alone whether those crimes warrant imprisonment, versus the actual transparency of US criminal logs versus the likes of Russia. Nobody will sincerely say that they prefer to go under the Stalinist judicial system and face Gulags versus going to trial in modern-day US lol. This is why using incarceration rates alone is a terrible test for corruption and oppression.
Generally speaking the incarceration rates are pretty comparable between modern Russia and US, ~328 vs. 350 / 100k. This of course taking Russian figures with a massive grain of salt. When aggregating all facets of corruption and oppression, Russia takes the cake., and we’ll get into that more below.
Goalpost moving aside, even if I entertained this, at this very second, Russia is still the chief offender given their ongoing direct assault on Ukraine that has seen 10,000 civilians and frankly many thousands of defending innocent Ukrainian military personnel, their direct involvement in Syria that has seen 300,000 civilians killed, the First Chechen War, the Second Chechen war where many more thousands of civilians were killed. Meanwhile who are Russia’s allies? China? North Korea? Iran? You consider these more free and less corrupt than the US too, do you? If by extension the US responsible for enabling Israel, then so too is Russia for Enabling Kim and the suffering and famine he causes within North Korea, or the Tibetans and Uyghurs oppressed in China.
Meanwhile Russia is in the bottom-20th percentile of the world in journalism transparency and journalism safety.
Meanwhile right now Russia’s highest court designated the LGBT movement as an extremist movement as they crack down terribly on the rights of these people. Meanwhile domestic violence has been decriminalized and no surprise, it runs rampant.
Yep no doubt we have major problems in the US - especially in state prisons and local jails in the south. I freely agree with that. So imagine how about Russia’s conditions must be for me to exclaim their conditions are worse. I mean, just look at what they did in Bucha with the world watching.
Hell, there isn’t even enough transparency and internal investigation within Russia TO expose something like this from within without the reporters being murdered. At least credit given that this was an American investigation that uncovered this and sought to correct it.
But to exclaim the average example of US prisons even remotely compares to modern Russian prisons / gulags? No, no chance. Nobody would genuinely choose a Russian prison over a US prison. Slave-like labor, you say? I guess you’re not familiar with Russian penal colonies. “Penal colonies originated from the Soviet Union’s work camps known as gulags but even date back to at least the 18th century.”
It’s peculiar that one would cite the 750,000 direct executions but not the millions caused by neglect and intentional starvation. Finally, Ukrainians would like a word on your claim of no genocide.
Forget the fact that there has been a lot of attention paid to the internal ethnic genocide Putin is committing by disproportionately sending ethnic minorities to the meat-grinder of the Ukrainian front.
Yes, every single major conflict is going to have these broader “excess death” implications proportional to the scale of the conflict. This is not unique to Iraq and Afghanistan, obviously. This goes for Syria, Chechen wars, Ukraine, and so on. Considering the global drop in grain supply thanks to Russia’s targeting of Ukrainian grain shipments, I suspect that too will be linked to broader famine crises in reports to come.
https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2023/country-chapters/russian-federation
It’s worse than “not good,” it’s complete and utter political oppression. A degree of authoritarianism that is non-existent in America at the present moment.
You’re violating your own date range again in this falsely equivalent whataboutism. Being “assaulted and arrested,” versus “being assaulted, arrested, and locked up for 15 years as systemic legal policy for a tweet protesting the war, or using a blank protest sign” is a bit different.
There is nothing wrong with legal extradition between two countries; the key question is whether the trial would be a kangaroo court – which in Russia, it absolutely would be.
Comparing RICO charges to 15 years imprisonment for blank signs or any sort of tweet or peaceful opposition to the war (or even calling it that) is the most absurd false equivalence fallacy I’ve seen in recent memory. I was able to protest the Iraq war; Russians are not. Massive difference.
Considering the primary global imperialist right now is Russia, I’d beg to differ on that notion. Considering Russia has objectively the worst humanitarian record, journalistic integrity record, most oppressive domestic laws on dissent, and is currently engaged in a globally-unpopular imperial war in Ukraine – I really don’t see how you continue to defend them while exclaiming US the bigger offender right now when no compelling data supports your argument.
The difference in incarceration rates doesn’t make up for these factors. Especially when considering the primary cause of these incarceration rates are the drug war which is finally turning a corner with legalization becoming mainstream.
So by mere quantity and severity, Russia continues to be far more corrupt and oppressive.
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You brought up gulags first. I was just responding to that.
Oh, then do you want to talk about how this country genocided the Native population from coast to coast? Do you want to talk about the reservation system, which inspired the Nazi concentration camps? Do you want to talk about the Trail of Tears and the Indian Wars and the French-American wars? Do you want to talk about the mountain of corpses from settler-colonialism which absolutely dwarfs anything the USSR ever did? Millions and millions dead, and though small pox killed the majority the United States is directly responsible for unimaginable horror. Do you want to talk about the scalp trade? Do you want to talk about the US Army eradicating the buffalo to starve the Natives? Do you want to talk about all the Native women that were kidnapped and raped and the reason so many white people in America have 1/8th Native ancestry? Holy fucking shit, talking about this country’s history makes me want to fucking kill myself. You want to talk about why I have Native ancestry on both sides of my family and have lily white skin despite that? How my ancestors were kidnapped and raped by settlers to breed the savagery out of them? Had their religion, their language, their entire way of life stolen from them.
I can’t continue this conversation. Just revisiting the history for the argument- I’m done. Leave me alone.
Yeah, sure, by all means – let’s do it. But only under the pretext that we can go further back in Russian history from the Circassian Genocide to the Red Terror to Ivan the Terrible and his Massacre of Novgorod, slavery in Russia, etc… There’s a lot more history to Russia than the United States, so I’m going to go out on a limb and say good luck with going down that rabbit hole as though it will benefit your position.
What I will say is that everything you mentioned I find reprehensible, too; but while I do believe the US has made clear progress since then and into the modern day, it seems quite evident that Russia is going the complete opposite direction and backpedaling as quickly as it can back to the USSR days.
I’d further bet money that if we polled a large swath of people, they would rather face a courtroom or imprisonment in the US than Russia. I know I would.