Donald Trump Is the War Crimes President

The barbarism of the Nazi regime in the 1930's and during WWII did no come to pass overnight.  There were numerous steps along the way that involved dehumanizing a targeted scapegoat population - e.g., Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, "communists, and others. Long before the orchestrated extermination of 6 million European Jews commenced in earnest, torture became normalized and callous brutality became accepted. Along the way, the Geneva Conventions were ignored by Hitler and his brutal regime. Here in America, the slide towards moral bankruptcy began under the Bush/Cheney regime - probably at Cheney's instigation -  and America began ignoring the Geneva Conventions and making illegal torture a part of America's policies.  Obama reversed the torture policy, but failed to hold those guilty under the previous Bush/Cheney regime accountable.  Now, under Trump, America is careening toward complete moral bankruptcy.   It is now American policy to place refugee children in cages and torture and war criminals are lauded by the occupant of the White House.  In a long piece, Andrew Sullivan looks at America's moral decline.  The only way to reverse this is by voting Trump out of office in November, 2020, since it appears clear Senate Republicans will ignore their oaths of office and will put party over country and morality.  Here are article excerpts: 

I saw the gripping New York Times documentary on Hulu this past week about the case of Navy SEAL Commander Eddie Gallagher, a rogue soldier who routinely shot civilians in Iraq for the hell of it, and finally stabbed to death a barely conscious captive young ISIS fighter who was the lone survivor of a missile hit on an enemy house. The documentary has video of the testimonies of his fellow SEALs, all of whom were in obvious anguish and pain as they told the truth to investigators. It also shows a photograph of Gallagher holding up the murdered kid’s head like a trophy in a wild-game hunt. The image is difficult to put out of your mind.

This kind of dehumanizing barbarism started, of course, with a euphemism. “Enhanced interrogation techniques,” we were assured, were nothing like torture. They were just a very intense form of questioning. “I want to be absolutely clear with our people and the world: The United States does not torture,” president George W. Bush insisted with a straight and serious face.

And then we discovered that these “enhanced techniques” were actually extremely similar to the verschärfte Vernehmung (intense interrogation methods) that the Gestapo once used. . . . . Nor did we have to imagine these horrors: Many of these techniques were ubiquitous at Abu Ghraib prison and photographed. The administration insisted that all of this was invented by a few rogue grunts on the ground, even though we now know that what we saw was the very low end of the abuse of prisoners that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney directly authorized.

The official black sites were dystopian torture chambers. When the torture started, many U.S. personnel, at first, couldn’t watch. Seeing human beings treated by Americans the way they had been treated by the Nazis sickened them. Cables were sent, and ignored. Tapes of the grotesque torture sessions were destroyed.

In short, the United States abandoned the Geneva Conventions it had once been instrumental in creating. And this continued under the Obama administration. Yes, the torture program, mercifully, was ended by executive order on Obama’s second day. But Geneva also requires member states to investigate all claims of war crimes and prosecute the perpetrators. The new president, leery of the divisive and emotional issue as he began his term in an economic crisis, decided to ignore them. In fact, for eight years, no one was even fired or demoted for war crimes, let alone prosecuted, and some were even promoted within the CIA. The message was clear: Americans who torture are essentially immune from prosecution. Torture thereby became normalized.

So it was not surprising that in 2016, a presidential candidate emerged who openly espoused torture as something he would bring back if he were elected. . . . . And it was unsurprising that this position won support from Republican primary voters, as if it were just one of many policy proposals, and not an unthinkable violation of domestic and international law.

Only Jim Mattis was able to restrain the commander-in-chief from restoring the torture program, even if it is clear that Trump still regards war crimes as a sign of strength. But signs were sent to the military and the world that this president admired the tactics of dictators and found democracies pathetic in comparison.

This is how liberal democracies disintegrate. A violation of core moral norms happens in one specific, exceptional case, such as after 9/11. Some even find reasons to justify it as an emergency measure (something Geneva rules out as a legal excuse). But torture then entrenches itself into the government apparatus and bureaucracy. There’s a record. There are government employees involved and doctors and psychologists. And any president has a choice.

Trump took the new normal and boosted it. “Torture works!” he declared. In the 2016 campaign, he was asked what he’d do if a military officer refused to obey an illegal order from him, and he responded: “They won’t refuse. They’re not going to refuse, believe me.”

After a group of six Navy SEALs decided, in great anguish, to report their murderous platoon chief for war crimes, and Gallagher was arrested and arraigned, Gallagher’s brother, Sean, went on Fox & Friends and appealed to Trump to step in. Trump first said he might pardon him after the trial.

Gallagher was acquitted, except for the charge of arranging the photograph of what he called a “deer kill,” holding the dead kid’s head up as a trophy. When the Navy, in a final weak attempt to punish him, tried to take Gallagher’s SEAL pin away from him, Trump personally intervened and insisted this war criminal would keep his pin, and that he was one of the “great fighters” in the U.S. military. Fox News celebrated . . .

A president who believes a war criminal is among the finest fighters the U.S. has and suggests he will pardon him after his trial is, quite simply, unique in the history of the U.S. So too is a president who threatens another country with the destruction of its cultural sites in revenge for any response to the assassination of one of its military and political leaders. In mere decades, we went from the architect and guardian of the Geneva Conventions to their nemesis.

The world once knew that the U.S. government would do its best always to follow those laws. There are likely to be war crimes in any real-world conflict, and the U.S. has committed its share of them. But George W. Bush was the first president to directly authorize something that George Washington had ruled out of bounds in the Revolutionary War. Washington’s words ring ever more tragically in the age of Trump: “Should any American soldier be so base and infamous as to injure any prisoner … I do most earnestly enjoin you to bring him to such severe and exemplary punishment as the enormity of the crime may require. Should it extend to death itself, it will not be disproportional to its guilt at such a time and in such a cause … for by such conduct they bring shame, disgrace and ruin to themselves and their country.”

Military honor and the laws of war are the mark of civilization, and something that takes centuries to build and one feckless decision to destroy. For an American president actually to celebrate such crimes, and even personally threaten to commit them, was unimaginable before now, before the shame and disgrace of Trump.

There were a few hours this past week when we were shaken out of the denial that comes with exhaustion. There we were, risking a real outbreak of war, and all we had was him. And this was not an exception in this presidency — just the most extreme example we have yet had of our collective helplessness in the face of one man’s fecklessness.

The administration has been incapable of providing any evidence for the “imminent” attack they used to justify the assassination of General Qasem Soleimani. It appears to me to have been invented. Regardless, there was time to consult allies, and to seek authorization from Congress for what was plainly an act of war.

But, of course, that didn’t happen. . . . The word for this is tyranny, as I noted three and a half years ago. Not tyranny in the sense that we do not still live in a free country, but tyranny in the classic sense: one-man, strongman rule.

In Plato’s words, when describing how a strongman’s rule unfolds: “Some of those who helped in setting him up and are in power — the manliest among them — speak frankly to him and to one another, criticizing what is happening … Then the tyrant must gradually do away with all of them, if he’s going to rule.”

And he [Trump] has pretty much done away with all of them. We’re left with a new and weak defense secretary, Mark Esper, constantly contradicted by his boss; Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a toady obsessed with Iran; and a war criminal as CIA director, Gina Haspel, who owes her job entirely to a torture-loving president. With this supine clique, Trump ordered the assassination of the top military leader of a country with which we are not at war. Congress was sidelined almost entirely; allies were blindsided. This was not a sane process of deliberation about potentially starting yet another war in the Middle East, considering its consequences, and calibrating a strategy. It was a strongman’s impulse.

Be very, very afraid.