Usually when a crack-pot presidential candidate, say Donald
Trump, says "we should bring back torture" I jump right on it. But
there are two reasons why I'm not as pumped up about this:
First Trump is an idiot. A lot of people can see this
including the more intelligent Republicans. The mainstream Republican
establishment really hates Trump. His is undisciplined and shoots his mouth off
without really caring what THEY think. This is one reason I actually like
Trump. No I would not actually vote for him nor campaign for him in anyway. But
I like how he is exposing the Republicans for the racist-xenophobic
Bigoted-tyrants they really are. That is not to say he does that on purpose,
but he does it none-the-less.
Second the US
has never really stopped using torture. Interrogators have been caught using
waterboarding and other criminal acts in the past. But they are masters of
manipulation and that is not going to change with or without Trump.
As for exposing the Republicans for the racist-xenophobic
Bigoted-tyrants they really are, here is what the McClatchyDC
said:
" Trump has become famous this campaign season for
making incendiary statements, from accusing Mexican immigrants of being rapists
to urging a ban on all Muslims entering the country. But his recent pledge to
return “enhanced interrogation techniques” to the methods U.S.
.....“I’m not really surprised because Mr. Trump is just
catering to his voters,” Ali Soufan, a pioneering former FBI interrogator who
in Senate testimony in
May 2009 accused the CIA of having lied about the success of its brutal
techniques, told McClatchy. “He appears to be running on a war-crimes platform.
This is possible because, unfortunately, no one has been held accountable for
our past torture, and when you don’t have people being held accountable, others
are going to repeat it.”
EXECUTIVE ORDER 13491, ISSUED BY PRESIDENT OBAMA IN JANUARY 2009 TWO
DAYS INTO OFFICE, ENDED THE BUSH-ERA CIA INTERROGATION
So there is already wording to the affect that Trump is all
those bad things. Even the news media is not surprised. But more than that we
see admission that nothing was ever done about the use of torture in the past
and manipulating people using dirty tricks or mind tricks is something the US intelligence
community (mostly our CIA) is really good at.
For example:
"Maria Hartwig, a psychology professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice just
blocks from Trump Tower in midtown Manhattan, said Trump’s debate comments
alarmed her.
“I think it’s disgraceful and worrisome,” said Hartwig, a
leading academic expert on police and intelligence interrogations. “It betrays
a complete lack of understanding about the nature of intelligence-gathering.
Torture, in short, has repeatedly been categorized by professional
interrogators as an amateur approach. It’s simply not an effective way of
getting diagnostic information.”
And on the subject of modern day interrogation techniques:
“Everything that we do, all the techniques that we employ
and train, are humane, lawful and based on the world-class research that we’re
doing,” Frazier Thompson,
the group’s director, told McClatchy on Wednesday. “And what that world-class
research says and has shown to us is that the rapport-based techniques . . .
will elicit more credible intelligence and evidence than any other type of
technique. So that’s how we operate.”
They claim it is humane and legal, but I wouldn't count on
that. The CIA and all of the US
intelligence community has never been honest to the American people. Lies and
deception are just part of what those people do. There is no reason to believe
that torture is behind us now. It reappeared in recent years and will reappear
again. We do know from all the dirty tricks the Republicans use to manipulate
voters, all the mind games they are capable of producing. We see it every
election season. It is not honest nor fair. And the tricks they use on
opponents of the empire are sure to be as clever and diabolical as they use on
the voters. An empire by its very nature is dishonest and cruel. Nothing can
change that accept to oppose the empire. And the US IS an empire.
-សតិវអតុ
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