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Comment by rooshdi | Hacker News Reader

The government has leverage to control mainstream media, and thus manipulate people's perceptions. If you're labeled a terrorist by their organization, you are not human anymore and your rights are nullified. Sad, but power does what it wants.

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If you're labeled a terrorist, you are not human anymore and your rights are void.

Well, from what we have seen, it's more like if you are even within a kill zone of the latest guided bomb of someone who has been labeled a terrorist, you are not human anymore and your rights are now null.

And we will have to be naive if we think it will stop here…

No, but you most likely will be labled a combatant after the fact. Even when you were a young child, that got killed in a drone attack. Only recently the US did tell its people, that the so called precision strikes (mostly from the CIA) did kill innocent people.

Until then it was: "We did only kill terrorists, enemy fighters and combatants."

Sorry, to say that, but the EX-POTUS Jimmy Carter seems to have gotten it right:

"America does not have any functioning democracy"

http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=de&sl=auto&tl=en&u=...

And everything above I said knowing, what is said of the killed father. Knowing him allegedly being an Al-Qaeda-Member and recruiter and so on. If the government had so much on him (and his son), why not trial him (even in absence) and let a jury decide?

Why use methods, worthy of some ruthless dictator, or the governments from humanities darkest moments?

Coming from Germany (and knowing, that our government is not one bit better, but not equipped that efficiently) I really do not understand, how any sane American official can tell the world, that the US is the democratic role-model for all to follow.

As per today's developments, I think the conspiracy theories related to the government controlling the media and labeling them unhuman terrorists can stop. See: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on the cover of the Rolling Stone.

I'm actually pretty happy about that cover.

We need to start having a more nuanced view of people. A common thread between the three people in this discussion: Trayvon Martin, Dzhokar Tsarnev, and Abdulrahman Al-Awlaki is that they are all young men who were killed and can be commonly reduced to stereotypes to fit a narrative (young black man up to no good, terrorist, terrorist).

But, when you dig a little deeper, it turns out there's a person under that sterotype! I'm happy to see the media start to see this and a national conversation grow around this; hopefully it will make us better human beings.

> A common thread between the three people in this discussion: Trayvon Martin, Dzhokar Tsarnev, and Abdulrahman Al-Awlaki....

They were all also unarmed when they were murdered.

Dzhokhar is alive, he's in custody.

Thanks. I misread the name.

When people insinuate government control of the media, they aren't implying that the editorial boards of every form of media run their material by a government representative, to which they get a yay/nay. It's quite a bit more nuanced that that.

So I'm not sure that seeing Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on the cover of a mainstream magazine should end the "conspiracy theories".

It's much more subtle than some people realize. There's not much need for a formal conspiracy when the incentives align themselves.

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