“In the wake of the terror attacks in England, France, Germany and elsewhere, can we finally admit that the war on terror is an utter and complete failure? So if the war on terror has failed, what should we do to stop terrorists?”
“With President Trump’s undeclared attack on Syria, a sovereign and independent nation, he has confirmed, once and for all, that he is just another foreign interventionist, no different from his predecessors Barack Obama and George W. Bush. That means, of course, another four years of war, bombings, assassinations, shootings, terrorism, war on terrorism, travel restrictions, walls, surveillance, incarceration, POW camps, torture, out of control federal spending and debt, and everything else that comes with an imperialist and interventionist national security state.”
Read more: http://www.fff.org/2017/04/07/trumps-new-war-america/
“The Trump administration’s justification for its airstrikes on Syria manages somehow to be even weaker than Obama’s Libya arguments. The time to push back is running out for Congress. If they can’t do it with a deeply, widely unpopular president who in his first three months in office has antagonized not just members of the opposition party but members of his own as well, they may never be able to.”
Read more: https://reason.com/blog/2017/04/07/congress-and-potus-agree-the-president-c
The United Nations special rapporteur on torture said on Monday that U.S. President Donald Trump needs to acknowledge that the extreme interrogation technique known as waterboarding is torture and therefore absolutely prohibited.
Meanwhile, draft executive orders have been circulated by the White House that would renegotiate the U.S. relationship with the U.N., including enacting “at least a 40 percent overall decrease” in remaining United States funding toward international organizations.
The Trump administration is a strong supporter of resuming methods of torture such as waterboarding that were terminated by the preceding Obama administration and widely considered to have been war crimes.
Via The Intercept:
A draft of the executive order obtained by the New York Times and Washington Post calls for senior officials to consider re-opening the CIA’s network of secret prisons, where terror suspects were disappeared and deprived of their rights.
And by rescinding President Obama’s 2009 executive order that banned torture and closed the CIA’s prisons — where many of the worst abuses of CIA’s post-9/11 torture program took place – it paves the way for illegal torture to take place in secret.
White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer disputed the authenticity of the draft order on Wednesday, saying that it is “not a White House document,” and that he had “no idea where it came from.” But when asked whether the administration was considering re-opening black sites, Spicer refused to answer, saying he would not comment on the document.
Via The New American:
If it was a war crime for which the United States “prosecuted and convicted a number of Japanese troops and officials” after World War II, it is still a war crime. If it was — as SERE taught American soldiers — among the “most severe of those [techniques] employed” by “brutal authoritarian enemies” when it was practiced by “the Nazis, the Japanese, North Korea, Iraq, the Soviet Union, the Khmer Rouge and the North Vietnamese,” simply referring to is as “an enhanced interrogation technique” does nothing to change what it really is. Just because Americans are on the giving end doesn’t make it any less wrong.
Or any more effective.
In fact, President Trump has even less excuse for his ignorance of the total lack of effectiveness of torture than Cain and Bachman had in 2011. Because — as The New American reported in April 2016 — newer information dispels any remaining myth that torture is anything other than worthless as far as intelligence gathering goes.
“It’s like a twisted version of the you-break-it-you-buy-it Pottery Barn rule: If we bomb a country or help destabilize its society, we will then ban its citizens from being able to seek refuge in the United States.”
Donald Trump’s executive order banning individuals born in seven majority-Muslim countries previously attacked by the U.S. from entering the U.S. even on second passports, a move which has already spurred a reciprocal travel ban on U.S. nationals by Iran, was stayed on Saturday by a federal judge after hundreds of enroute travelers found themselves abruptly detained, tech company employees were unable to re-enter the U.S., and protests erupted at airports nationwide. Attorney General Sally Yates has now been fired and replaced with a temporary White House appointee for refusing to mount a legal defense of the travel ban.
“39 percent of the Americans who supported torture told the ICRC they ‘didn’t realize my country had agreed to ban torture’ as a signatory to the Geneva Conventions. The ICRC study is not the first to establish Americans’ increasing tolerance for torture in recent years. A Pew Research Center study in February found that 58 percent of Americans think the torture of suspected terrorists can be justified. Of 38 nations surveyed, only five countries have a higher tolerance for torturing suspected terrorists, the Pew study found: Uganda (78 percent), Lebanon (72 percent), Israel (62 percent), Kenya (62 percent) and Nigeria (61 percent).”
“U.S. air forces have been operating under looser rules of engagement in Iraq and Syria since last fall. The war commander, Lt. Gen. McFarland, now orders air strikes that are expected to kill up to 10 civilians without prior approval from US Central Command, and US officials acknowledge that air strikes are killing more civilians under the new rules. US officials previously claimed that air strikes in Iraq and Syria had killed as few as 26 civilians. A senior Pentagon official who is briefed daily on the air war told USA Today that was unrealistic, since air strikes that have destroyed 6,000 buildings with over 40,000 bombs and missiles have inevitably killed much higher numbers of civilians.”
“Given that the U.S. military had just a few years before dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, why would they have any compunctions about bombing North Koreans with napalm and fleas with bubonic plague? Don’t forget, after all, the mindset of the U.S. national-security state during the Cold War — the ‘war’ that was used to justify converting the federal government into a national-security state. The Cold War national-security state mindset was: A commie is a commie and a gook is gook; no big deal to send any and all of them to the hereafter. The Korean civil war was no more the business of the U.S. national-security state than Vietnam’s civil war was.”
http://fff.org/2016/01/15/the-pentagons-b-52-message-to-north-koreans/