1/27/17: Trump spent his campaign talking
about bringing back waterboarding and harsh interrogation techniques to defeat
ISIS. General James Mattis, his Defense Secretary, explains why torture doesn’t
work and warns that Trump’s plan violates the Geneva Convention.
The presidentsays “never
mind.” Mattis’s opinions will “override” his own. Big fans of torture are
miffed.
BLOGGER’S NOTE (November 1, 2021): A military tribunal
convenes at Guantanamo Bay to sentence Majid Khan. Khan, “a suburban Baltimore
high school graduate turned Qaeda courier,” who plead guilty to terrorism
charges in 2012, uses the hearing to offer graphic testimony regarding CIA
enhanced-interrogation tactics. (The hearing was long-delayed because the CIA
wanted to keep its tactics secret.)
The eight judge-panel sets punishment for Khan at
26 years, starting in 2012, but, as allowed under military rules, seven judges
write a letter to the senior official who will review the case, urging clemency
for the prisoner.
Before sentencing, Mr. Khan
spent two hours describing in grisly detail the violence that C.I.A. agents and operatives inflicted on him in
dungeonlike conditions in prisons in Pakistan, Afghanistan and a third country,
including sexual abuse and mind-numbing isolation, often in the dark while he
was nude and shackled.
“Mr. Khan was subjected to
physical and psychological abuse well beyond approved enhanced interrogation
techniques, instead being closer to torture performed by the most abusive
regimes in modern history,” according to the letter, which was obtained by The
New York Times.
The panel also responded to Mr.
Khan’s claim that after his capture in Pakistan in March 2003, he told
interrogators everything, but “the more I cooperated, the more I was tortured,”
and so he subsequently made up lies to try to mollify his captors.
“This abuse was of no practical
value in terms of intelligence, or any other tangible benefit to U.S.
interests,” the letter said. “Instead, it is a stain on the moral fiber of
America; the treatment of Mr. Khan in the hands of U.S. personnel should be a
source of shame for the U.S. government.”
…
The clemency letter also
condemned the legal framework that held Mr. Khan without charge for nine years [he was first arrested in 2003] and denied him
access to a lawyer for the first four and half as “complete disregard for the
foundational concepts upon which the Constitution was founded” and “an affront
to American values and concept of justice.”
We have known, as human beings, at least since
the invention of the rack and wheel, that torture “works.”
If you want to get people to confess – to anything
– yes. Torture works.
Torture Donald J. Trump right now, and he’ll admit
he lost the 2020 election (which is true). He’ll also admit to banging a porn
star (true), to being a witch (false), and having sex with dolphins while vacationing
at Mar-a-Lago (false.)
11/24/18: Several thousand U.S. troops
are celebrating Thanksgiving down along the Mexico border. They are there, and
they will do their best, to “protect” the rest of us from the threat of
imaginary smallpox (see: 10/30/18)
and “dangerous immigrants,” many of whom look like these:
Are there some dangerous individuals in any group, including
the feared “caravan” that keeps Donald J. Trump up at night? Of course. There
have been bad customers in every group of immigrants, starting with those who
landed at Plymouth Rock. John Billington we’re talking about you.
And smallpox? Now those Pilgrims definitely brought smallpox
with them, along with their Bibles and guns.
____________________
“I don’t think he
understands the proper use and role of the military.”
Col. David Lapan
____________________
Yet, as much as Trump likes to talk about “my military” and
“my generals” and pretend he has the best interests of those who serve at
heart, not everyone is convinced he knows what he’s doing in that regard:
“There was the belief that over
time, he would better understand, but I don’t know that that’s the case,” said
Col. David Lapan, a retired Marine who served in the Trump administration in
2017 as a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security. “I don’t think
that he understands the proper use and role of the military and what we can,
and can’t, do.”
As The New York Times
makes quite clear, Col. Lapan isn’t the only officer who seems to have doubts.
“If a president routinely and
cynically leverages our nation’s armed forces for short-term political
advantage, the professional ethos” of the officers’ corps will be degraded,
said Karl W. Eikenberry, a retired three-star Army general and a former
commander of American forces in Afghanistan. “This, in turn, would threaten
one of the foundational principles of our republic [emphasis added] – that our
military must remain outside of politics.”
In fact, a group of soldiers asks Defense Secretary James
Mattis when he visits the border what their mission is. “Short term, get the
obstacles [barbed wire, etc.] in,” Mattis tells them.
3/2/19: President Trump shows up
Saturday at the CPAC convention and unloads the junk drawer of his mind.
____________________
A litany
of idiocy
____________________
For two hours, two minutes, seventeen seconds, he rambles
across the right-wing landscape, getting lost in the woods, getting tangled in
briars, falling into fast-moving streams, climbing out dripping wet, and
tripping over every stone of veracity in his path. The Gettysburg Address this
speech is not.
First, he wanders on stage and humps the American flag. From
there, it goes downhill. At one point, he admits:
You know, I don’t know, maybe
you know. You know, I’m totally off script, right … You know, I’m totally off
script right now. And this is how I got elected, by being off script. True. And
if we don’t go off script, our country is in big trouble, folks. ’Cause we have
to get it back.
The president hits all the old notes from Beethoven’s Liar’s
Symphony No. 9. Hillary colluded with Russians, not him! The Mueller probe is a
“hoax” and a “witch hunt.” Democrats “don’t care about crime.” They want MS-13
gang members to rape and kill. Climate change isn’t real and socialists – basically
Democrats – want to take away cows, cars, and planes. It’s a litany of idiocy,
but the crowd cheers every syllable.
At one point, Trump is feeling sorry for himself. Why, oh,
why, did he ever appoint Jeff Sessions!
The
attorney general recuses himself and I don’t fire him. No obstruction. That’s
the other thing – if you use your rights, if you use your power, if you use
Article Two, it is called obstruction. But only for Trump, for nobody else,
Unfortunately, you put the wrong people in a couple of
positions, and they leave people for a long time that should not be there, and
all of a sudden they’re trying to take you out with bullshit.
Trump continues:
Robert Mueller put 13 of the
angriest Democrats in the history of our country on the commission. How do you
do that? These are angry, angry people. You take a look at them. One of them
was involved with the Hillary Clinton foundation, running it. Another one has
perhaps the worst reputation of any human being I’ve ever seen. All killers.
(Okay, that sounds nuts.)
Trump isn’t done trashing the people he chose to fill his
cabinet back when he was promising to surround himself with “the best people.”
Another target of contempt is former Secretary of Defense James Mattis.
I said, “We’re going to give you
a new nickname because ‘Chaos’ is not a good nickname.” So we changed his name.
We called him “Mad Dog.” But it wasn’t working too well. Mad Dog wasn’t working
too well. So what happened is, I flew to Iraq. I wanted to meet the people
on-site because I learn more sometimes from soldiers what’s going on than I do
from generals. I do, I hate to say it. And I tell it to the generals all the
time. But I didn’t have to go there. I didn’t have to go there.
But, hey, look at me, Trump wants everyone to think. I did
go. I’m a hero. Forget about that time I had those bad feet.
Chain
migration and the First Lady’s family.
As for the president, he’s on to the next topic. He’s listing
his greatest hits. He’s talking immigration:
We need workers to come in. But
they need to come in legally, and they’ve got to come in through merit, merit,
merit. They’ve got to come in through merit, they have to be people who can help
us, they have to be people who can love our country, not hate our country. We
have people in Congress right now, we have people in Congress that hate our
country. And you know that. And we can name every one of them if they want.
They hate our country. Sad. It’s very sad. When I see some of the things being
made, the statements being made, it’s very, very sad. And find out: How did
they do in their country? Just ask ’em. How did they do? Did they do well? Were
they succeeding? Just ask that question. Someone would say, “Oh, that’s
terrible that he brings that up,” but that’s okay, I don’t mind, I’ll bring it
up. How did they do in their country? Not so good. Not so good.
“These people are sick,” Trump adds, describing Democrats,
liberals and critics in a way meant to stir visceral hate.
Again, the crowd goes wild. No one stops to wonder: How did
the parents of the First Lady manage to enter this country?
What merits did they bring?
And what about all those undocumented workers who are surfacing, working at Trump golf clubs?
No one in that CPAC throng stops to wonder. They cheer.
Trump spends a significant chunk of his two hours plus
howling about the Green New Deal. He doesn’t
have any plan to address the threat of climate change, mainly because he
doesn’t understand science.
His base isn’t any smarter when it comes to the subject. So,
he’s going to scare the hell out of them by portraying a call for America’s
leaders to address the danger into a plot to pull up capitalism by the roots
and stamp out the American Dream.
Apparently, if you broach the matter of climate change it
means none of us will ever be able to fly or drive a car or turn on lamps
again:
No planes. No energy. When the
wind stops blowing, that is the end of your electric. Let’s hurry up. “Darling,
darling, is the wind blowing today? I would like to watch television, darling”
... Their plan would remove every gas-powered car from American roads. Oh,
that’s not so bad. They want you to have one car instead of two. And it should
be electric. Okay. So tell people, no more cars, no more cars ... It would end
air travel. But you’ll get on a train, don’t worry about it. You just have to
cross off about 95 percent of the world. And it would force the destruction or
renovation of virtually every existing structure in the United States. New York
City would have to rip down buildings and rebuild ’em again. I don’t think so.
This is the craziest plan. And yet I see senators that are there for 20 years,
white hair. See, I don’t have white hair. I don’t have white hair. I see these
white hairs, longtime senators, standing behind this young woman [he means:
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez], and she’s ranting and raving like a lunatic[emphasis added], and these senators: “Yes, I agree with this. Yes I
agree.”
Like most of the fear the right likes to stir up – death panels
for granny – Obama is coming for all the guns – transgender people are lurking
in the next bathroom stall – this is rank manure.
And the crowd shouts with glee.
Has
there ever been a president quite as great?
Mercifully, Trump runs out of steam. He closes by bragging
about his success on the world stage. Has there ever been a president quite as
great as him?
And just in finishing up, as you
know, I just returned from Vietnam, where I had very productive meetings with
Chairman Kim Jong Un. We get along. We’ve developed a good relationship, very
good, and made great historic progress…One administration gave billions of
dollars to him and got nothing. We haven’t given him anything yet. I look
forward to maybe doing something at some point. But I know one thing, I am
going to get other countries to give. Maybe not us, but I’m going to get other
countries to give, if it all works out, if it all works out. But I had to walk,
because every once in a while, you have to walk. Because the deal wasn’t a deal
that was acceptable to me. I don’t like these deals that politicians make. They
make a deal just for the sake of doing it. I don’t want to do that. I want to
make a deal that either works, or let’s not make it. But the one thing we have
done is we have no testing, no missiles going up, no rockets going up. No
nuclear testing…We got our great people back. We got our great, great people.
And that includes our beautiful, beautiful Otto. Otto Warmbier, whose parents
I’ve gotten to know, who’s incredible. And I am in such a horrible position
because, in one way, I have to negotiate. In the other way, I love Mr. and Mrs.
Warmbier, and I love Otto. It is a very, very delicate balance. He was a
special young man, and to see what happened was so bad, was so bad…And a lot of
what I do with respect to North Korea, and any success that we hopefully have,
and we’ve had a lot, we’re given no credit.
Yes, yes, it’s very sad. No one gives Trump any credit.
So, let me see if I understand Trump Logic. If a country
doesn’t test nuclear weapons (but has them), or fire missiles that can reach
the USA (even if they proved they can), then that’s Trump magic?
