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.

With Bolton's Appointment, It’s Time to Panic

Unhinged war monger John Bolton.

Donald Trump and his base of support centered on Christian extremists, white supremacists and general misogynists all live in an alternate, objective fact free universe.  Their world view which is full of  hate and paranoia is fanned by Fox News and other right wing "news" outlets that  present a daily dose of propaganda that would have made Joseph Goebbels proud.  Now, Trump has appointed John Bolton to be National Security Advisor.  Bolton is just as unhinged as the ugliest elements of Trump's base and, more frighteningly, is trigger happy and sees military action rather than diplomacy as a solution for  every foreign dispute.  He was a strong advocate of the Iraq War and seems to have learned nothing from that debacle.  A piece in Slate looks at why sane Americans and members of the military should be very, very afraid of where Trump/Pence may take the country.  Another piece in New York Magazine voices similar concerns.  First, here are highlights from Slate:

It’s time to push the panic button.

John Bolton’s appointment as national security adviser—a post that requires no Senate confirmation—puts the United States on a path to war. And it’s fair to say President Donald Trump wants us on that path.

After all, Trump gave Bolton the job after the two held several conversations (despite White House chief of staff John Kelly’s orders barring Bolton from the building). And there was this remark that Trump made after firing Rex Tillerson and nominating the more hawkish Mike Pompeo to take his place: “We’re getting very close to having the Cabinet and other things I want.”

Bolton has repeatedly called for launching a first strike on North Korea, scuttling the nuclear arms deal with Iran, and then bombing that country too. He says and writes these things not as part of some clever “madman theory” to bring Kim Jong-un and the mullahs of Tehran to the bargaining table, but rather because he simply wants to destroy them and America’s other enemies too.

His agenda is not “peace through strength,” the motto of more conventional Republican hawks that Trump included in a tweet on Wednesday, but rather regime change through war. He is a neocon without the moral fervor of some who wear that label—i.e., he is keen to topple oppressive regimes not in order to spread democracy but rather to expand American power.

In the early days of the George W. Bush administration, Vice President Dick Cheney finagled Bolton a job as undersecretary of state for arms control—an inside joke, since Bolton has never read an arms-control treaty that he liked. But his real assignment was to serve as Cheney’s spy in Foggy Bottom, monitoring and, when possible, obstructing any attempts at peaceful diplomacy mounted by Secretary of State Colin Powell.

When Powell got the boot, Cheney wanted to make Bolton deputy secretary of state, replacing Richard Armitage, who resigned along with his best friend Powell. But Powell’s replacement, Condoleezza Rice, who had been Bush’s national security adviser, blocked the move, fully aware of Bolton’s obstructionist ideology.

As a compromise, Bush nominated Bolton to be United Nations ambassador, but that move proved unbearable to even the Republican-controlled Senate at the time. . . . . he was hostile to the idea of international law, having once declared, “It is a big mistake for us to grant any validity to international law even when it may seem in our short-term interest to do so—because over the long term, the goal of those who think that international law really means anything are those who want to constrain the United States.”

These might be quaint notions for some eccentric midlevel aide to espouse, but the United Nations is founded on international law, Security Council resolutions are drafted to enforce international law, and . . . some of those resolutions were proving useful for expressing, and sometimes enforcing, U.S. national security interests. How could someone with these views serve as the U.S. ambassador to the U.N.?

In his confirmation hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Bolton put on a dreadful show, grumbling and scowling through his walrus mustache.

[A]t least McMaster assembled—and often listened to—a professional staff at the National Security Council and insisted on ousting amateur ideologues, several of them acolytes of Flynn.

Bolton is not likely to put up with a professional staff, and the flood of White House exiles will soon intensify. One subject of discussion at Bolton’s Senate hearings, back in 2005, was his intolerance of any views that differed from his own. He displayed this trait most harshly when, as undersecretary of state, he tried to fire two intelligence analysts who challenged his (erroneous) view that Cuba was developing biological weapons and supplying the weapons to rogue regimes.

Nor is Bolton at all suited to perform one of a national security adviser’s main responsibilities—assembling the Cabinet secretaries to debate various options in foreign and military policy, mediating their differences, and either hammering out a compromise or presenting the choices to the president.

Then again, there may now no longer be many differences to mediate in this administration. The last of the grown-ups is Secretary of Defense James Mattis . . . . [Trump] didn’t know that Mattis regularly consulted a personal library of some 7,000 volumes on history and strategy, that (like most generals) he’s not too keen to go to war unless he really has to, and that (also like most generals) he takes the Geneva Conventions seriously and opposes torture.

With Tillerson out, Bolton in, and Pompeo waiting in the wings for confirmation, Trump is feeling his oats, coming into his own, like Trump is free to be Trump. Finding out just who that is may make the rest of us duck and cover.

The New York Magazine piece contains this:

From the outset of his presidency, to which he was elevated with barely any preparation, Donald Trump was surrounded by a protective cordon of advisers, as a child monarch might. In return for absorbing his tantrums, they would educate their unsteady charge, who would wind up, after pratfalls and drama, inflicting no more ruin on the country than a normal modern Republican president might. . . . Somehow it seemed we might muddle through.

Now Trump is breaking through the protective cordon. The people who joined the government to save Donald Trump from himself, or to save the world from Trump, are leaving. Gary Cohn and Rex Tillerson are gone. Trump is reorganizing his legal team, mobilizing for war against the special counsel. And now he has finally cast off his most important minder, National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, and replaced him with John Bolton.

Bolton . . . is a true believing ideologue firmly encamped on his party’s right flank, who appears regularly on Fox News to propound ultra-simplistic solutions to the world’s problems, which Trump can easily grasp on his sofa.

Bolton’s foreign policy notions can be quickly operationalized, given the near-total command the executive branch has over foreign policy. What’s more, those ideas have the potential to kill large numbers of people.

Bolton has long been estranged from a substantial segment of his own party, which regards him as dangerous. . . . . while many of his colleagues came away at least somewhat chastened by their errors, Bolton did not. “I still think the decision to overthrow Saddam was correct,” he said in 2015.

Bolton is considered so dangerous, even by many Republican hawks, because he is a true believer, deeply in the grips of black and white notions of simple morality that are difficult to reconcile with the messy reality that is the world. There is a long history of ideologues joining a presidential administration and terrifying the establishment, only to be assimilated into its bureaucratic routines. But Bolton’s character and history seem to defy any such domestication.

The combination of Bolton and Trump poses an especially potent danger. Trump once declared “I love war, in a certain way.” Both men think in terms of zero-sum conflict and harbor an obsession with dominating their adversaries. They are temperamental twins. In North Korea or elsewhere, Bolton could goad Trump into dangerous reaction.

It has been the tail risks – any number of low-probability, high impact events that are far more likely to occur with an authoritarian buffoon in the White House than under a normal president. Trump has spent his presidency surrounded by people who were at least attempting to contain these risks – say, a Constitutional crisis, or a meltdown of the international order. As awful and comically surreal as the first year and a quarter of his term has been, after Trump has taken full command of his administration, we may see it as a golden age.

Be very afraid.  Those of us who live in an area like Hampton Roads, Virginia, with a huge military personnel do not want to see the lives of friends and neighbors thrown away yet again.  Just as importantly, we should not want to see Trump by either mistake or design authorize the use of nuclear weapons.  

Trump and Pence Stand By Promise to Utilize Torture

If one wants to see a prime example of the hypocrisy and, in my view, evil that is emblematic of right wing Christians, look no farther than Vice-President elect Mike Pence.   Pence is vitriolic in his opposition to abortion and LGBT rights, but has no problem with slashing the social safety net and leaving millions without health care or other life saving assistance.  Worse yet, as he reaffirmed today, he's perfectly fine with the use of torture.  Never mind that it is a violation of both U.S. law and international law, including the Geneva Conventions, under which Nazi and Japanese military figures who authorized torture were tried and executed.  Think about it - Trump has promised to authorized torture and make himself worthy of a death sentence and execution under international law.  And 81% of evangelical Christians voted for this man.  I'm sorry, but Pence - and Trump - is a foul, hypocrisy ladened individual who ought to be a pariah among decent people.  Those who voted for him are no better in the final analysis.  The Washington Post looks at Pence's reaffirmation of the use of torture.  Here are excerpts:

In his first round of Sunday show interviews since the election, Vice President-elect Mike Pence did not rule out the possibility that President-elect Donald Trump could reinstate water boarding as an interrogation technique during his administration.

On CBS Sunday, “Face the Nation” host John Dickerson brought up Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and his comments Saturday at the Halifax International Security Forum. At a panel discussion there, McCain vehemently insisted that any attempt to bring back water boarding, which simulates drowning, would be quickly challenged in court, the Associated Press reported.

Dickerson pointed out to Pence that Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.), whom Trump plans to nominate as director of the CIA, supports Trump's position that perhaps water boarding should be reinstated.

Dickerson then played a clip of McCain's remarks at the Halifax summit from Saturday.

“I don’t give a damn what the president of the United States wants to do or anybody else wants to do. We will not waterboard. We will not torture,” McCain said, emphasizing certain words with a point of his finger, to applause. “My God, what does it say about America if we're going to inflict torture on people?”

Pence seemed unfazed after he watched the video. . . . Trump said during the campaign that he would reinstate the use of waterboarding against terrorism suspects — a practice that Congress made illegal after its use during the George W. Bush administration.

Torture is banned under U.S. law and the Geneva Conventions. 

At a rally last November in Columbus, Ohio, Trump promised to reinstate waterboarding and perhaps other methods of torture beyond it.

“Would I approve waterboarding? You bet your ass I would — in a heartbeat,” Trump said as the crowd cheered. “And I would approve more than that. Don't kid yourself, folks. It works, okay? It works. Only a stupid person would say it doesn't work.”  Trump repeated “It works” multiple times.

Trump doubled down on his pledge to bring back waterboarding at another rally a few months later in South Carolina, as well as in several interviews throughout the campaign.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), one of Trump's many opponents during the Republican presidential primary race, followed Pence on “Face the Nation” and said he agreed with McCain.  “We should telegraph to the world that we're better than this,” Paul told Dickerson.

"Wrong Then, Wrong Now" - White House Video Rips Cheney

There are few American politicians who reach the threshold of being truly evil.  Most simply put self-advancement over the interests of their constituents and others.  However, Dick Cheney, in my opinion, meets the criteria to be deemed truly evil.  He advocated lying to the American public to take the nation to war in Iraq, he convinced his idiot superior, George W. Bush, to authorize the use of torture in violation of the Geneva Conventions, and now he wants to take America to war against Iran.  The man is both evil and delusional.  Thousands of wasted American lives in Iraq and trillions of wasted dollars wasn't enough for Cheney.  Thankfully, in advance of Cheney's lying and disinformation speech against the Iran nuclear agreement, the White House has gone on the offensive against one of the foulest individuals in American history.  Talking Points Memo looks at the White House attack.  Here are highlights:

Timed to a speech given by former Vice President Dick Cheney slamming President Obama's Iran deal, the White House released a video highlighting Cheney's continual defense of the Iraq war.

The two-and-a-half-minute video titled "Former Vice President Dick Cheney: Wrong Then, Wrong Now" -- which was featured prominently on the White House homepage Tuesday -- spares no punches.

It begins with a Fox News host asking Cheney last week why anyone who believes Cheney was wrong on Iraq should listen to him about the Iran deal.

"Because I was right about Iraq," Cheney said.

It then segues into the abundant news clips from the run-up to Iraq War in which Cheney offers scores of claims first urging then defending military action -- from touting the presence of weapons of mass destruction to predicting that Iraqis would great American troops "as liberators."

No one benefited from the Iraq War except perhaps Halliburton.  Oh, and did I mention that Cheney has lots of Halliburton stock?  I guess he wants to make another fortune off the squandered lives of our military personnel and wasted taxpayer dollars.  The man is a war criminal and needs to be tried as such.  Would the death penalty be too much?  Not in my opinion.

Here Come the War Crime Apologists

It's no surprise that many on the far right are falling all over themselves to defend the criminal use of torture revealed by the Senate torture report released yesterday.  I'm sure many of them, had they been in Nazi Germany in the period 1938 - 1945 would have found justification for the countless horrors the Nazi regime inflicted on millions.  The numbers of victims involved in the Bush/Cheney torture program may be smaller by far than what Hitler oversaw, but torturing smaller numbers doesn't somehow make it acceptable or any less criminal under international law.  As noted previously, it is no wonder Republicans did not want this report to see the light of day because through Bush and Cheney they own it.  A column in the New York Times looks at the efforts of the war crimes apologists.  Here are excerpts:

The publication today [yesterday] of a censored summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation into the use of torture at C.I.A. prisons has brought war-crime apologists out from under their rocks.

Chief among them is former Vice President Dick Cheney, one of the all-time great prisoner abuse enthusiasts. Even before the report was issued, Mr. Cheney was telling The New York Times on Monday that torturing prisoners was absolutely the right thing to do and that everything the C.I.A. did was authorized.

“What I keep hearing out there is they portray this as a rogue operation, and the agency was way out of bounds and then they lied about it,” Mr. Cheney said in a telephone interview. “I think that’s all a bunch of hooey. The program was authorized. The agency did not want to proceed without authorization, and it was also reviewed legally by the Justice Department before they undertook the program.”

Representative Mike Rogers, Republican of Michigan, said releasing the report was a “terrible idea,” because it would put Americans in danger. “Our own intelligence community has assessed that this will cause violence and deaths,” he said, conveniently ignoring that it’s in the intelligence community’s interest to make such a prediction.

Mr. Rogers is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, which has done absolutely nothing to shed light on this dismal chapter in American history. It’s specious to argue that transparency about torture, rather than torture itself, is to blame for any future retaliation.

Let’s be clear, the acts committed against the C.I.A.’s prisoners — no matter how murderous and awful some of those prisoners were — were disgusting and inexcusable. They violated all kinds of American and international laws against torture.

“The truth is sometimes a hard pill to swallow,” he [John McCain] said. “The American people are entitled to it nonetheless. They must be able to make judgments about whether these policies and personnel who supported them were justified in compromising our values.”

CIA Torturers Running Scared - Karma Can Be a Bitch

Funny how perspectives change when one ceases being the torturer and suddenly realizes that the day of reckoning for past crimes may be just around the corner. Oh, and don't try to say one was just following orders.  Nazi officials tried that one and it rightfully did not work.  Each of us at times has to decide whether we will commit moral wrongs or not.  Sometimes, the easier course is to "follow orders," but that doesn't make what you do morally right.  A piece in The Daily Beast looks at CIA operative who now fear the day of reckoning may be at hand.  Here are excerpts:

The CIA has offered to perform security assessments for former intelligence officers that may be identified in the so-called Senate torture report, expected to be released Tuesday.

Most of these officers are not identified by their real names in the report, which was drawn up by the Democrats of the Senate Intelligence Committee. But the CIA remains concerned that close readers will be able to figure out, based on cross-referencing and context clues, who the anonymous officers are. (Some very senior and well-known officials will be mentioned by name in the report.)

Current and former CIA personnel say they are fearful for their personal safety, and that of their families, should they be identified after the report is released and become targets for harassment or retribution. So the agency has agreed to determine their degree of exposure to any risk of identification, according to one senior intelligence official who spoke anonymously because he was not authorized to speak publicly. “They will help people assess their individual situations, assessing their homes, and helping them keep a low profile,” the official told The Daily Beast.

Roughly 15 agency employees were directly involved in running the program, . . . 

Separately, a lawmaker said the CIA had briefed him on the possible need for “personnel moves” related to the security fallout from the interrogation report. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the security preparations publicly.

The CIA has long been concerned that if any of its personnel were identified following the release of the report, which details interrogation techniques President Obama has called torture, it could jeopardize employees’ physical safety and make it impossible for them to work overseas. 

There's more, so read the entire piece. The hypocrisy of many now worried about the report's release had no qualms about engaging in torture and ignoring the Geneva Conventions at the time.  Perhaps they should have thought more about the crimes they were committing at the time. 

The Myth That The World Is Losing Faith in Obama

America's improved favorability - click image to enlarge

To listen to Fox News, a/k/a Faux News, the world is losing faith in Barack Obama and America's image in the world is suffering.  The evidence?  The statements of war criminal Emperor Palpatine Cheney - who has in fact been indicted for war crimes in absentia overseas - and neocons who backed the idot fools errand in Iraq that squandered thousands of American lives and wasted untold billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars.  Indeed, one could argue that the best accolades one can receive is to be condemned by Cheney and his like minded extremist, power mad mental midgets. A piece in The Atlantic looks at the reality and, if anything, the world is happy to have Bush/Cheney removed from the levers of power. Here are article highlights:

Dick Cheney is worried about America’s image in the world. “I think the perception around the world is increasingly negative,” the former vice president declared on Wednesday to Sean Hannity, one of the few talk-show hosts who could hear such a claim without being struck dumb by its irony. It’s become a frequent Republican refrain. President Obama’s foreign policy, opines Karl Rove in a new Wall Street Journal column, has produced “strained relations with allies and declining confidence in American leadership.” Marco Rubio recently added that, “In Asia, our allies are increasingly unsure about our ability to counter both North Korea and Chinese expansionism.”

In a way, it’s heartening that Cheney and Rove feel the need to make non-Americans the ventriloquist dummies for their anti-Obama hostility. It suggests awareness that when it comes to foreign policy, they need spokespeople more credible than themselves. And it suggests a recognition, not always obvious during the George W. Bush years, that Americans should actually care what the rest of the world thinks.

[I]t’s hard not to ask the obvious question: compared to when? In fact, while faith in the United States, and in Obama personally, has declined modestly since 2009, it is still dramatically higher than when Cheney and Rove roamed the West Wing. For more than a decade, the Pew Research Center has been asking people around the world about their opinion of the United States. The upshot: In every region of the globe except the Middle East (where the United States was wildly unpopular under George W. Bush and remains so), America’s favorability is way up since Obama took office. In Spain, approval of the United States is 29 percentage points higher than when Bush left office. In Italy, it’s up 23 points. In Germany and France, it’s 22.

The U.S. is 19 points more popular in Japan, 24 points more popular in Indonesia, and 28 points more popular in Malaysia. Likewise among the biggest powers in Latin America and Africa: Approval of the United States has risen 19 points in Argentina and 12 points in South Africa.

Cheney attributed America’s supposedly deteriorating reputation to Obama personally. “If we have a problem with weakness,” he explained, “it's stemming from the White House.” But, in fact, the guy in the White House retains a personal brand that outshines America’s as a whole. And when you compare global perceptions of Obama to global perceptions of Cheney’s old boss, the gap is jaw-dropping.

Again, the numbers come from Pew, which has been asking people in key countries every year whether they have “confidence” in America’s president to “do the right thing in world affairs.” Obama’s popularity is down since 2009. Still, in Mexico and Argentina, the president’s 2013 numbers (the most recent we have) are 33 percentage points higher than Bush’s in 2008. In South Korea, the margin is 47 points. In Japan, it’s 45 points. In Brazil, it’s 52 points. In Britain, it’s 56 points. In France, it’s 70 points. In Germany, it’s 74 points.

In case you’re reading quickly, 74 points isn’t Obama’s approval rating in Germany. It’s the gap between his approval rating and Bush’s. In George W.’s final year in office, 14 percent of Germans had faith that the president of the United States would do the right thing internationally. Last year, 88 percent did.

[I]n most of the world, popular opinion influences policy. When Obama wants the assistance of Indonesia or Malaysia or South Africa in fighting jihadists or cracking down on Iranian banks, it helps that their leaders aren’t embarrassed to be seen with him.

When Bush was president, Cheney and Rove were defiantly uninterested in what other nations thought about American foreign policy. Now they’re convinced that those other nations yearn for the pre-Obama days. Back then, they were merely ideologically blinkered. Now they are verifiably, empirically wrong.

Frankly, it's to the point where one has to wonder why ANY credible news outlet- which leaves out Fox News - would have Cheney on for any reason.   The damage that he and Chimperator Bush did to America's image is incalculable.  Instead of being on a news talk show, Cheney should be standing on trial for war crimes and reaping the consequences visited on Germans and Japanese after World War II who authorized war crimes like Cheney and Bush.

The Barbarism and Obscenity of Sarah Palin and Her Supporters

No matter what else he does during the balance of his remaining political career, John McCain will forever be remembered as having unleashed on America one of the most obscene, barbaric and false Christians to have ever carried the GOP standard: Sarah Palin.  Not only is the woman a mental midget in may ways, but she has pulled many in the GOP base down into a fetid swamp of hate, prejudice and advocacy for torture and war crimes.  Perhaps the only individual as bad or worse than Palin is the monstrous Dick Cheney, a/k/a Emperor Palpatine Cheney on this blog.  What's perhaps more frighten than Palin herself, however, is the fact that (i) her support of torture and war crimes is now mainstream among white evangelicals and (ii) few in the Republican Party have dared condemn her and/or argue  that decent Republicans need to shun her.  Palin - and her Christofascist supporters - has reached a new low in her recent support of torture and equating water boarding to "baptism for terrorists."  Andrew Sullivan takes Palin to task in a post.  Here are highlights:

If you want a classic example of political Christianism – and its active hostility to spiritual Christianity – it’s hard to beat Sarah Palin’s remarks yesterday. I offered a brief response last night, but this obscenity needs to be unpacked some more. And the first thing to say is that a former US vice-presidential candidate did not just endorse a war crime; she endorsed it as routine for every human being suspected of terrorism. And she seems to endorse it as an introduction to captivity. “Waterboarding is how we baptize terrorists” is a glib statement but a revealing one. 

She believes that torture should be the first resort – a sign of how America treats its foes, a badge of honor. What can one say but that this is a bona fide fascistic sentiment. It revels in violence against individuals tied down by their hands and feet and strapped to a terrifying board in order to be suffocated hundreds of times to near-death. It is the kind of statement you might expect from the Khmer Rouge, or from the Chinese Communists who perfected “stress positions”, or from the Nazis, whose Gestapo pioneered “enhanced interrogation”, i.e. brutal torture that would leave no physical traces. Except it’s worse than that. Even totalitarian regimes have publicly denied their torture. Their reticence and lies are some small concession of vice to the appearance of virtue. Not Palin – who wants to celebrate brutal torture as the American way.

And then she manages to go one step further. She invokes torture in the context of a Christian sacrament. Not since the Nazis’ Deutsche Christen have we seen something so disgusting and blasphemous in the morphing of Christianity into its polar opposite. 

It reveals that vast swathes of American Christianity are objectively anti-Christian, even pagan, in their support for this barbarism. Rod should know this by now. In the best recent polling on the question, 62 percent of white evangelical “Christians” back torture as often or sometimes justified, with only 16 percent holding the orthodox position that it is never justified. Now compare those numbers with Americans who are unaffiliated with any religion: the number in that demographic is 40 percent in favor in some or many cases, and 26 percent against it in all circumstances. Is this a function of wayward and uncommitted Christians? Nope. Support for torture is highest among those who attend church at least weekly and lowest for those who rarely or never go to church. In America, torture is a Christian value. And some people wonder why I prefer to term “Christianist” to describe these people.

[T]orture is a far graver evil, even for orthodox theologians, than non-procreative or non-marital sex. And yet today’s Christianists are obsessed about the latter and not just indifferent to the former, but actually in favor of it. It’s this twisted set of priorities, this exquisitely misplaced set of fears, and this utter ignorance of even basic Christian teaching that reveals all that’s so terribly wrong with American Christianity. It has become its own nemesis.

As I have said before, conservative Christianity has become an abject evil.   Despite their posturing and self-congratulation, conservative Christians are, in my view, among the most immoral members of the population.  Decent people - and decent politicians - need to shun these Christofascists the way lepers were shunned in the Bible.  They are a menace and will be the cause of Christianity's death.

Quote of the Day: Torture - The Defining Moment for America and the GOP

There are times that I vehemently disagree with Andrew Sullivan who I had the pleasure of meeting a few years ago.  His wrongheaded defense of Brendan Eich is but one case in point.   His continued behavior as little more than a fluffer for Pope Francis is another.  But from time to time Sullivan zeros in and gets it right dead on.  This is particularly true in the contact of the soon to be released U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee Report on the war crimes of the last administration which is nearing publication.  The report will likely be an indictment of George W. Bush, Dick Chaney and others in the Bush/Cheney regime who made a mockery of the Geneva Conventions and authorized torture policies that are little different than those who brought severe punishment down on members of the Nazi regime and members of Japan's World War II military establishment.  Ultimately, if Bush, Cheney and others go unpunished, America can truly no longer claim to be a decent, civilized country that abides by international law.  Indeed, America will be no better than its foulest enemies.  Here are highlights of Sullivan's spot on analysis:

As the Senate Intelligence Committee Report on the war crimes of the last administration nears publication (if the CIA doesn’t censor it to shreds), you can begin to hear the stirrings of some kind of reckoning with the past. As the years have gone by, the incontestable fact that the Bush administration tore up the Geneva Conventions, brazenly broke domestic and international law, and unleashed a wave of abuse and torture and mistreatment of prisoners, has been harder and harder to deny.

The law against torture is absolute. There is never any defense of it because of perceived utility. Dick Cheney keeps boasting and bragging of the torture program he invented for the first time in American history, publicly admitting a war crime for which there is no statute of limitations in domestic and international law.

But the one place where the debate has not really broken out is in the political party that embraced those war crimes – the GOP.  . . . . Very few Republican writers want to confront the topic; Charles Krauthammer actually favors the setting up of a specific torture unit, without pondering whether its shirts should be brown. Torture enthusiasts, like Marc Thiessen, are given perches at the Washington Post, while war criminals like Cheney and Hayden are given endless platforms on the Sunday morning talk shows. 

But if Rand Paul runs for president, a debate will surely have to break out. David Corn – is David trying to kill off Paul’s candidacy or trumpet it? - digs not so deep again to discover unequivocal hostility to the torture of the Bush-Cheney years in some interviews Paul did in 2009.

The good thing about this stance – and the real promise of a Rand Paul candidacy – is that it will force an honest debate in the GOP. No more denialist bullshit about “EIT”s; no more pussy-footing around the fact that of course what was done was torture; and a demand for clarity about whether a future Republican president would seek to finally consign the Geneva Conventions in the trash-heap of history or whether he or she will return to the traditions of George Washington and the civilized world. We may get the wrong answer from the GOP nominee. But at least we will know where we are. And whether Americans care any more about an embrace of the barbarism so often exhibited by our enemies.

Again, I make no bones about the fact that, in my view, Bush, Cheney and others need to be tried for war crimes and, if convicted, punished severely - .  Then and only then can America claim to hold a high moral ground.  

War Criminal

The C.I.A. Torture Cover-Up

I have long advocated that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and their minions and sycophants who authorized the use of torture in the so-called war on terror and in Afghanistan and Iraq need to be put on trial for war crimes.  In my view, one of the biggest indictments against Barack Obama is that he allowed murderous monsters escape justice and by doing so he made every American complicit to one extent or another in these war crimes.  Had the proper prosecutions been undertaken, we would not be hearing pontification from Cheney since at best he'd be in prison and at worst (at least from his perspective, not mine) he'd be in his grave after execution.  These things DO MATTER and one need look no farther than Vladimir Putin pointing at American wrong doing as justification for his own heinous deeds.  The main editorial in the New York Times looks at the CIA's efforts to cover up war crimes activities of its own.  People need to be fired and prosecuted.  Will Obama and the Justice Department have the spine to do so?   Here are editorial excerpts:

It was outrageous enough when two successive presidents papered over the Central Intelligence Agency’s history of illegal detention, rendition, torture and fruitless harsh interrogation of terrorism suspects. Now the leader of the Senate intelligence committee, Dianne Feinstein, has provided stark and convincing evidence that the C.I.A. may have committed crimes to prevent the exposure of interrogations that she said were “far different and far more harsh” than anything the agency had described to Congress.

Ms. Feinstein delivered an extraordinary speech on the Senate floor on Tuesday in which she said the C.I.A. improperly searched the computers used by committee staff members who were investigating the interrogation program as recently as January.

Beyond the power of her office and long experience, Ms. Feinstein’s accusations carry an additional weight and credibility because she has been a reliable supporter of the intelligence agencies and their expanded powers since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 (sometimes too reliable). 

On Tuesday, the C.I.A. director, John Brennan, denied hacking into the committee’s computers. But Ms. Feinstein said that in January, Mr. Brennan acknowledged that the agency had conducted a “search” of the computers. She said the C.I.A.’s inspector general had referred the matter to the Justice Department for possible criminal prosecution. “Besides the constitutional implications,” of separation of powers, she said, “the C.I.A.’s search may also have violated the Fourth Amendment, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, as well as Executive Order 12333, which prohibits the C.I.A. from conducting domestic searches or surveillance.”

Ms. Feinstein said that when Senate staff members reviewed thousands of documents describing those interrogations in 2009, they found that the C.I.A.’s leadership seriously misled the committee when it described the interrogations program to the panel in 2006, “only hours before President Bush disclosed the program to the public.”

The interrogations included a variety of brutal methods, some of which — waterboarding in particular — were unequivocally torture.

She dismissed the acting C.I.A. general counsel’s claim that the Senate staffers had hacked agency computers as intimidation. The counsel, she noted, was a lawyer and then chief lawyer for the interrogations division and is “mentioned by name more than 1,600 times in our study.”

The Justice Department now has a criminal investigation to conduct, but the C.I.A. internal review and the Senate report must be released. Ms. Feinstein called on President Obama to make public the Senate report, which he has supported doing in the past. She said that this would “ensure that an un-American, brutal program of detention and interrogation will never again be considered or permitted.”

The lingering fog about the C.I.A. detentions is a result of Mr. Obama’s decision when he took office to conduct no investigation of them. We can only hope he knows that when he has lost Dianne Feinstein, he has no choice but to act in favor of disclosure and accountability.

Much of what was done is akin to what Hitler's Nazi regime did - and people were tried, sentenced and in some cases executed for what they did.  The standard now should be no different. 

Release the Torture Reports

Some of the darkest deeds done in recent American history were done under the Bush/Cheney regime which authorized torture, committed war crimes and willfully violated the Geneva Conventions.  Many Americans would like to sweep those crimes under the rug and pretend that they never happened at the direction of a sitting president and vice president of the United States.  But they did, and the best way to make sure that such crimes never happen again is to release the reports on the torture and crimes done in the name of the American people.  We need to learn from this dark chapter of American history so that it may never happen again.  It is important that Barack Obama stop stonewalling in an apparent effort to avoid embarrassment to America and those who cooperated in lawless torture.   The New York Times concurs and is call for the release of the full reports.  Here are editorial excerpts:

A dozen years after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, it is appalling that official reports about the extent and nature of the rendition, detention and torture that came in their aftermath are still being kept from the American public and even members of Congress charged with overseeing intelligence activities. 

The Senate Intelligence Committee’s exhaustive 6,000-page report was completed last December. But it has yet to be declassified. Likely the closest to a full accounting the nation is going to get, the report is said to contain unsparing criticism of the program. News reports have said it chronicles the Central Intelligence Agency’s repeated misleading of the White House, Congress and the public about the value of brutal and lawless methods that yielded little valuable intelligence despite the claims of former Vice President Dick Cheney and other defenders of torture.

The lack of transparency was underlined on Tuesday during a hearing on the nomination of Caroline Krass to be the C.I.A.’s top lawyer. Senator Mark Udall, a Colorado Democrat, disclosed the existence of an internal study done by the C.I.A. under Mr. Brennan’s predecessor, Leon Panetta, that contradicted the agency’s response to the Senate study. Mr. Udall said he believed it was “consistent with the Intelligence’s Committee’s report.” Mr. Udall said: “This raises fundamental questions about why a review the C.I.A. conducted internally years ago — and never provided to the committee — is so different from the C.I.A.’s formal response to the committee study.” 

The committee must insist on the Obama administration’s cooperation in making public all three documents — the Senate Intelligence Committee report, the official C.I.A. response to it, and the internal C.I.A. study. 

Rendition, illegal detention and torture did not arise on President Obama’s watch. He has repeatedly denounced the use of torture and ended the detention program as one of his first White House acts. But his expansive claims of secrecy have succeeded in blocking victims’ lawsuits and helping to keep details of rendition and torture secret, denying the country a reckoning necessary for the historical record, establishing accountability and avoiding similar human rights violations in the future. 

Mr. Obama has a duty to ensure prompt public release of the documents — minimally redacted to protect genuine national security secrets, not to avoid embarrassment. 

Dick Cheney: Nelson Mandela Was a Terrorist

Many around the globe are morning the passing of South Africa's Nelson Mandela who suffered 27 years in prison because of his struggle to end Apartheid and then went on to be South Africa's first black president, preaching a message of forgiveness as he tried to move his country forward.  But not all hold Mandela or his memory in high regard.  Take Dick Cheney - a man guilty of war crimes under the Geneva Conventions and usually referred to as Emperor Palpatine on this blog - who didn't regret his 1986 vote against freeing Mandela from prison.  Cheney, the war criminal in all but formal charges, maintained that Mandela was a terrorist and deserved to remain in prison.   Sadly, I suspect that many in the increasingly white supremacist dominated Republican Party share Cheney's revolting views.  Here are highlights from Huffington Post: 

In 1986, Nelson Mandela -- the former president of South Africa who died Thursday at the age of 95 -- was serving the 23rd year of what would ultimately be a 27-year prison sentence. The Western world was finally acknowledging the true horrors of Apartheid, a system of racial segregation that denied basic rights to blacks -- including citizenship and the right to vote -- and brutally oppressed a generation of South Africans fighting for equality.

In the U.S. Congress, lawmakers were ready to show their opposition to the South African regime with the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act, a bill that called for tough sanctions and travel restrictions on the nation and its leaders, and for the repeal of apartheid laws and release of political prisoners like Mandela, then leader of the African National Congress (ANC).

The measure passed with bipartisan support, despite strong and largely Republican opposition. President Ronald Reagan was among those most opposed to the bill, and when he finally vetoed the measure over its support of the ANC, which he maintained was a "terrorist organization," it took another vote by Congress to override it. Among the Republicans who repeatedly voted against the measure was future Vice President Dick Cheney, then a Republican congressman from Wyoming.

[T]he Wyoming Republican has never said he regretted voting the way he did. In fact, in 2000, he maintained that he'd made the right decision.  “The ANC was then viewed as a terrorist organization," Cheney said on ABC's "This Week." "I don't have any problems at all with the vote I cast 20 years ago.''

Try as  I might, I cannot avoid the conclusion that Cheney is a despicable human being.  As are many of his racist cohorts in today's GOP.  R.I.P. Nelson Mandela.

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The Ugly Truth About American War Crimes

As noted before, one of my biggest disappointments with Barack Obama is that he has refused to open the lid on American war crimes and torture that were official policy under Bush/Cheney.  The provisions of the Geneva Conventions were knowingly and deliberately ignored and violated and in the process America lost all moral standing to ever criticize other nations for human rights abuses.  Worse yet, war criminals such as George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have been allowed to go free of any consequences.  Andrew Sullivan sums the situation up this way:

The country still won’t come to terms with the fact that the US perpetrated a global campaign of war crimes, torture, dehumanization and cruelty for seven years, and its impact is still being felt. It is felt not simply among all those dictators – from the master-torturer, the King of Jordan, to the Chinese and Russians, beaming broadly, knowing that the US has now no moral legs to stand on, especially since Obama’s decision to ignore binding Geneva Convention laws that require prosecution of the guilty.

But there is a human toll as well: not just among those still living with PTSD from the brutal torture sessions, but from the perpetrators as well. Many did so with qualms, under orders; others, given the signal from the commander-in-chief that torture was now an American value, took to it with relish and occasionally desperation. One reluctant participant soldier, just killed himself – yet another one – because he couldn’t live with what he had actually been ordered by his president to do.

Sullivan is referring to the suicide of  Daniel Somers who was a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom.  In his suicide note, Somers gives an indication that things that were done are far worse than most Americans realize.  Somers and others like him simply found it impossible to go on living knowing what they had done under orders.  Here are portions of Somers' suicide note via Gawker:

On June 10, 2013, Daniel wrote the following letter to his family before taking his life. Daniel was 30 years old. His wife and family have given permission to publish it. 
 

I am sorry that it has come to this.

The fact is, for as long as I can remember my motivation for getting up every day has been so that you would not have to bury me. As things have continued to get worse, it has become clear that this alone is not a sufficient reason to carry on. The fact is, I am not getting better, I am not going to get better, and I will most certainly deteriorate further as time goes on. From a logical standpoint, it is better to simply end things quickly and let any repercussions from that play out in the short term than to drag things out into the long term.

You must not blame yourself. The simple truth is this: During my first deployment, I was made to participate in things, the enormity of which is hard to describe. War crimes, crimes against humanity. Though I did not participate willingly, and made what I thought was my best effort to stop these events, there are some things that a person simply can not come back from. I take some pride in that, actually, as to move on in life after being part of such a thing would be the mark of a sociopath in my mind. These things go far beyond what most are even aware of.

To force me to do these things and then participate in the ensuing coverup is more than any government has the right to demand. .  .  .  .  And for what? Bush’s religious lunacy? Cheney’s ever growing fortune and that of his corporate friends? Is this what we destroy lives for

The fact is that any kind of ordinary life is an insult to those who died at my hand. How can I possibly go around like everyone else while the widows and orphans I created continue to struggle?

 Bush and Cheney in their megalomania and religious insanity simply did not care what was done to others.  The same holds for many in the "Christian" Right who view non-Christians as not even human.  And, apparently, Obama is little better.  How else to explain his refusal to see that war criminals be brought to justice.  Americans need to know the horrors done in their name.  By doing nothing, we all end up with blood on our hands.  I find myself less than proud to be an America as any decent moral person should be.

Bush/Cheney Betrayal of America: China Is Reaping Biggest Benefits of Iraq Oil Boom

Remember how dim witted Chimperator George Bush and Emperor Palpatine Cheney claimed that Iraq would repay America for the costs of the fool's errand known as the Iraq War?  Ironically, on the same day that Bradley Manning's trial for allegedly releasing classified information, a New York Times story reveals that America threw away over $1 trillion and threw away thousands of American lives so that China, not America, could be the big winner in the aftermath of the disastrous Iraq War.  Making the situation even worse, guess who holds much of the debt incurred to finance the Bush/Cheney fool's errand?  China, of course.  That's right, American taxpayers have been doubly screwed.  The GOP mantra to average Americans ought to be bend over and hold your ankles.  Here are highlights from the Times story:

BAGHDAD — Since the American-led invasion of 2003, Iraq has become one of the world’s top oil producers, and China is now its biggest customer. 

China already buys nearly half the oil that Iraq produces, nearly 1.5 million barrels a day, and is angling for an even bigger share, bidding for a stake now owned by Exxon Mobil in one of Iraq’s largest oil fields. 

“The Chinese are the biggest beneficiary of this post-Saddam oil boom in Iraq,” said Denise Natali, a Middle East expert at the National Defense University in Washington. “They need energy, and they want to get into the market.” 

Before the invasion, Iraq’s oil industry was sputtering, largely walled off from world markets by international sanctions against the government of Saddam Hussein, so his overthrow always carried the promise of renewed access to the country’s immense reserves. Chinese state-owned companies seized the opportunity, pouring more than $2 billion a year and hundreds of workers into Iraq, and just as important, showing a willingness to play by the new Iraqi government’s rules and to accept lower profits to win contracts. 

“We lost out,” said Michael Makovsky, a former Defense Department official in the Bush administration who worked on Iraq oil policy. “The Chinese had nothing to do with the war, but from an economic standpoint they are benefiting from it, and our Fifth Fleet and air forces are helping to assure their supply.” 

In the desert near the Iranian border, China recently built its own airport to ferry workers to Iraq’s southern oil fields, and there are plans to begin direct flights from Beijing and Shanghai to Baghdad soon. In fancy hotels in the port city of Basra, Chinese executives impress their hosts not just by speaking Arabic, but Iraqi-accented Arabic. 

For China, Iraq is one of several countries it increasingly relies on to keep its growing economy running. China recently became the world’s biggest oil importer, and with its consumption growing, it is investing heavily in oil and gas fields around the world — $12 billion worth in 2011, according to the United States Energy Department. Over 50 percent of its oil imports come from the Middle East, even as imports from Iran have been reduced in recent years. “It’s pretty simple,” said Kevin Jianjun Tu, an expert on Chinese energy policies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “China needs more energy and needs to diversify its sources.” 

Bradley Manning expose American war crimes and atrocities.  Meanwhile, Bush and Cheney authorized war crimes, violations of the Geneva Conventions - actions that led to Japanese and Nazi officials to suffer long prison terms or even execution - and they have suffered no consequences whatsoever.  Now we learn that their idiot war aided China, not America.  In short, the wrong individual is being prosecuted.  Bush and Cheney need to be prosecuted.