A Conservative's view on waterboarding

[Valerie]

President Donald J Trump & His Cabinet Take Us To War

"Several months ago, a foreign policy expert on the international level went to advise Donald Trump. And three times Trump asked about the use of nuclear weapons. Three times he asked at one point if we had them why can't we use them"

Trump reportedly asks why US can't use nukes: MSNBC

 

[Valerie]

During the Republican primaries, the conservative TV host Joe Scarborough, otherwise famously cosy with Trump, pressed the candidate about his sympathies for Putin – who, in Scarborough’s words, “kills journalists and political opponents”.

A few days later, on a more prominent Sunday-morning politics programme, the former White House adviser George Stephanopoulos challenged Trump again. When Trump protested that “nobody’s proven that he’s killed anybody, as far as I’m concerned”, Stephanopoulos confidently replied: “There have been many allegations that he was behind the killing of Anna Politkovskaya.” Trump parried as best he could. But the issue obviously hasn’t gone away.

In an interview before the Super Bowl in early February, Trump was confronted by Fox blowhard Bill O’Reilly. “Putin’s a killer,” said O’Reilly, to which Trump infamously responded, “There are a lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. What do you think? Our country’s so innocent?”


Donald Trump on terrorists: 'Take out their families'



Boris Nemstov Plaza



Geneva Conventions bar Donald Trump's idea of killing terrorists' families

Common sense dictates, however, that if one signed up for military service, the chances of embracing military values increases, which in the United States includes not killing innocent civilians or violating the Geneva Conventions.

Truman Project

Meet the Generals Who Spoke Out Against Donald Rumsfeld's War

 

[Valerie]

Is the GOP now the party of authoritarianism?

Donald Trump Poses an Unprecedented Threat to American Democracy

A report circulated highlighting his 1990 interview in which Trump praised the brutality of the Tiananmen Square crackdown.

This is not the first time I had seen Trump praise dictators.

80 times Trump talked about Putin



My previous view of Trump was as a kind of vaccine. The Republican Party relies on the covert mobilization of racial resentment and nationalism. Trump, as I saw it, was bringing into the open that which had been intentionally submerged.

It seemed like a containable dose of disease, too small to take over its host, but large enough to set off a counterreaction of healthy blood cells. But the outbreak of violence this weekend suggests the disease may be spreading far wider than I believed, and infecting healthy elements of the body politic.

I remain convinced that Trump cannot win the presidency. But what I failed to account for was the possibility that his authoritarian style could degrade American politics even in defeat. There is a whiff in the air of the notion that the election will be settled in the streets — a poisonous idea that is unsafe in even the smallest doses.

Here is another factor I failed to predict. Trump, as I’ve noted, lies substantively within the modern Republican racial political tradition that seamlessly incorporates such things as the Willie Horton ads and the uncontroversial service of Louisiana representative Steve Scalise, who once called himself “David Duke without the baggage,” as House Majority Whip. But Trump’s amplification of white racial resentment matters. His campaign has dominated the national discourse. Millions of Americans who have never heard of Steve Scalise are seized with mortal terror of Trump, whose ubiquity in campaign coverage makes him seem larger and more unstoppable than he is. And terror is corrosive.

Donald Trump Poses an Unprecedented Threat to American Democracy

Donald Trump -- Conservative Movement Shouldn't Support Him | National Review

 

[danielpalos]

"WHEN US Representative Steve King learned that Osama bin Laden had been killed by US troops in Pakistan, he couldn’t resist a little crowing about the efficacy of torture. “Wonder what President Obama thinks of water boarding now?’’ the Iowa Republican tweeted on May 2.

It was an outrageous remark, but King wasn’t going out on a limb. A parade of others, mostly Republicans, have joined him in claiming that the death of bin Laden had vindicated the use of waterboarding — the most notorious of the “enhanced interrogation techniques’’ the Bush administration employed to extract information from senior Al Qaeda detainees....

...I don’t know whether waterboarding was indispensable to rolling up bin Laden; for every interrogation expert who says it was, another expert argues the opposite. But the case against waterboarding never rested primarily on its usefulness. It rested on its wrongfulness. It is wrong when bad guys do it to good guys. It is just as wrong when good guys do it to Al Qaeda....

The killing of bin Laden was gratifying, but it was no vindication of torture. Republicans rightly argue that much credit is owed to George W. Bush, who launched an effective war on terror and pursued it with fierce resolve. But Bush was wrong to permit waterboarding, and wrong to deny that it was torture. I don’t agree with Obama on much, but when it comes to waterboarding, he is right. America will defeat the global jihad, but not by embracing its most inhuman values."

Ends don’t justify the means - The Boston Globe

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Jacoby_(columnist)

The right wing doesn't care about natural rights or individual liberty, if it is not specifically about guns.

Congress was unwilling or unable to muster enough votes for a formal declaration of war with wartime tax rates, to Prove it under Any form of Capitalism.