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northway
Joined: 05 Jul 2010
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 Posted: Tue Feb 09, 2016 10:51 pm Post subject: |
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| I really think Rubio is cooked. He's done the talking points broken record twice in a span of a few days. I don't think that's survivable in today's campaign climate. |
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bucheon bum
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
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| Posted: Wed Feb 10, 2016 2:57 pm Post subject: |
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I never thought i'd say this but: God Bless Chris Christie! Looks like he killed Rubio's campaign.
Just hoping Sanders can do reasonably well in NV and SC. |
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Plain Meaning
Joined: 18 Oct 2014
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| Posted: Thu Feb 11, 2016 7:57 pm Post subject: |
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| bucheon bum wrote: |
I never thought i'd say this but: God Bless Chris Christie! Looks like he killed Rubio's campaign.
Just hoping Sanders can do reasonably well in NV and SC. |
http://www.politico.com/2016-election/results/map/president/new-hampshire
He did well in New Hampshire. His tie-loss in Iowa was due to Iowa's precinct-by-precinct, regional-instead-of-individual vote tallies. In New Hampshire, college clusters counted for one-person-one-vote. Unfortunately, superdelegates violate this principle. So he has 60% of the vote in New Hampshire and exactly 15 of the 30 (of 32 total) delegates. I do not see how he wins like this. |
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Plain Meaning
Joined: 18 Oct 2014
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| Posted: Thu Feb 11, 2016 10:25 pm Post subject: Trump, Rubio are evil |
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Donald Trump embraces torture
(which, by the way, does not work)
Shooting from the gut, Donald Trump advocated 'a lot worse than waterboarding,' i.e., he embraced Dick Cheney's and George W. Bush's policy of torture, and promised to go even further.
Look, we can argue about banning Muslims or building a wall on the border, but torture is evil and without redeeming efficacy.
Vox: Why Republicans are debating torture
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The late Christopher Hitchens once voluntarily underwent waterboarding, just to see whether it was torture. He concluded, unequivocally, that it was.
"The inhalation brought the damp cloths tight against my nostrils, as if a huge, wet paw had been suddenly and annihilatingly clamped over my face," he recalled in a Vanity Fair essay. "Unable to determine whether I was breathing in or out, and flooded more with sheer panic than with mere water, I triggered the pre-arranged signal and felt the unbelievable relief of being pulled upright and having the soaking and stifling layers pulled off me. I find I don’t want to tell you how little time I lasted." |
Christopher Hitchens was not right about everything, but you have to admire his approach to the matter of waterboarding and torture.
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| "Waterboarding is fine, and much tougher than that is fine," Trump said at a Monday campaign event in New Hampshire. "When we're with these animals, we can't be soft and weak, like our politicians." |
This is what happens when you embrace toughness and manliness over civilization and the rule of law. You end up with evil.
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| Previously, Trump promised to "bring back" types of torture "a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding" during Saturday's Republican debate. The rest of the GOP field took a somewhat more nuanced position. Marco Rubio categorically refused to rule out any torture techniques, for fear of helping terrorists "practice how to evade us." |
There is Rubio, that little corporate stooge, willing to dive into the gutter with Trump.
Ironically, Jeb Bush, George W. Bush's brother, disavowed torture. |
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stilicho25
Joined: 05 Apr 2010
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| Posted: Fri Feb 12, 2016 3:08 am Post subject: |
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I think its a repudiation of democratic socialism and the last 80 some years of post war western civ. Its a response to immigration, the current ideologies in academia etc. Groups like the Bundy's, trump, sanders and all are all signs of it. Unfortunately they are throwing out the baby with the bathwater. You can get rid of cultural marxism without bringing back torture.
By the by, did anyone else see that Herbert Marcuse pops up in "hail caesar!" Is this some nod to the right from the coen brothers? |
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Fox
Joined: 04 Mar 2009
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| Posted: Fri Feb 12, 2016 4:07 am Post subject: |
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| stilicho25 wrote: |
| You can get rid of cultural marxism without bringing back torture. |
There's no need to "bring back" torture, it never really went away.
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Obama administration still operates under Bush torture memos
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The post-9/11 torture program is dated to a September 17, 2001, Memorandum of Notification (MON, aka the “Gloves Come Off” finding) — notably a day after Vice President Dick Cheney’s TV appearance with Tim Russert, where Cheney and Russert blithely concurred it was time for the US to embrace the “dark side” — which was used as cover and as the foundation for subsequent findings by the Bush Administration’s legal team.
But that 2001 finding doesn’t have an expiration date, and there is no evidence of an Obama-era finding that directly controverts the Gloves Come Off memorandum. In fact, there is evidence that the Obama administration continues to operate under that finding (or did until at least 2012).
The finding that authorized the torture program also authorized drone strikes without notable process or oversight. Just three days into office, Obama OK’d a strike inside Pakistan that reportedly killed 11 civilians, and over the course of 2009, the CIA — Obama’s CIA — conducted 52 drone strikes, killing hundreds.
The drone strike that killed Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen, in 2011, was launched without due process and again, under the legal cover of the 2001 MON. And, as has been noted by Marcy Wheeler, when the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 2012 that Obama could withhold the language in legal findings that authorized the torture programs, it did so under the authority of that seminal memorandum. |
Personally, the mass murder of civilians strikes me as more, not less, problematic than torture, but the point is that the Obama Administration has not only declined to pursue any serious accountability for torture ("We have to look forward"), but continued to utilize the same document which provided overarching legal justification for it to justify its own actions. Arguably the Obama Administration itself even actively continues to torture people, either psychologically (sleep deprivation, long-term solitary confinement, etc.) or perhaps even physically (interrogation during "extraordinary rendition"). In any case, a President who opted to torture would not be "bringing it back," they would simply be maintaining the course, and they could expect no real attempt to hold them accountable for their conduct. |
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stilicho25
Joined: 05 Apr 2010
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| Posted: Fri Feb 12, 2016 7:09 am Post subject: |
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| Good point fox. It really kills me how easy it is for the media to get me worked up. Trump loves torture! Then you take a moment and you figure, that makes him just like every other president for the last few decades... |
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Leon
Joined: 31 May 2010
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| Posted: Sat Feb 13, 2016 7:21 pm Post subject: |
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| So I actually enjoyed having trump at the most recent Republican debate and was glad that someone was willing to call the Iraq war a disaster. |
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Plain Meaning
Joined: 18 Oct 2014
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| Posted: Mon Feb 15, 2016 9:18 pm Post subject: |
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Whether or not the Deep State continues to conduct torture, the Obama administration took great efforts to eliminate its practice, with an important caveat.
According to the law, yes, a Republican President would be bringing back waterboarding
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President Obama signed an executive order in 2009 banning the use of torture by any government agency. Last year, Congress codified that ban into law in the National Defense Authorization Act. So, if waterboarding is considered torture, it would take an act of Congress to allow its use as an interrogation technique, since that's now forbidden under current U.S. law. Only those interrogation techniques outlined in the Army Field Manual are considered legal — and those techniques do not include waterboarding.
But if waterboarding is not considered torture, a president could argue he or she has the legal right to order it — much as George W. Bush did during his administration. |
Note that Fox's article is from December, 2014, and the NDAA was signed in 2015.
The US is party to international conventions which prohibit torture
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The UN Convention Against Torture explicitly prohibits torture. It even states, "No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture," and adds, "An order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification of torture." The United States signed that treaty in 1988 and ratified it in 1994, so it is bound by it.
Moreover, torture violates customary international law, which, according to the International Court of Justice Statute, is "a general practice accepted as law." The prohibition against torture is established under customary international law as jus cogens (Latin for "compelling law"), also called a "peremptory norm," which is a principle under international law that forbids any deviation. As Human Rights Watch explains, jus cogens "has the highest standing in customary law and is so fundamental as to supersede all other treaties and customary laws (except laws that are also jus cogens). Criminal acts that are jus cogens are subject to universal jurisdiction, meaning that any state can exercise its jurisdiction, regardless of where the crime took place, the nationality of the perpetrator or the nationality of the victim."
Walter Ruiz, defense lawyer for Mustafa al-Hawsawi, a defendant in the 9/11 case and Guantánamo detainee who was held and tortured in CIA black sites, clarified the reach of the Convention Against Torture in a conversation with Truthout. He explained that the convention is "a far-reaching international document that brings everyone and all nations together to affirm that torture is, in fact, illegal. So now they're passing a bill that affirms exactly what has always been the case? As if to say, before, it wasn't illegal? It's nonsense. Of course it was illegal then and it's illegal now."
There's nothing wrong with the passage of the Senate bill, according to Ruiz; he calls it a "nice, positive public affirmation of the principle." However, he says, we must remember that it does not do anything new, and that the law prohibited torture during the thick of the "war on terror," as well.
"[The bill] doesn't change what has always been the case," Ruiz said. "And it has always been the case in 2000 and 2001, 2002, 2003, when these things were happened by US-sponsored actors and by US government agents, as well." |
Arguably, torture has always been illegal under US law, since before 9-11 and through the Bush Administration, because of the US's international commitments. I can go deeper into this, but the point is that whether Obama's 2009 Executive Order or Congress's 2015 prohibition on torture were even necessary remains controversial.
How the NDAA prohibits torture
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President Obama today signed into law an updated defense authorization bill that includes a landmark provision reinforcing the United States’ ban on the use of torture. Human Rights First notes, however, that other provisions in the bill will severely hamper the president’s ability to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay by the end of his term in office.
“This legislation is an historic victory in the fight to reestablish a durable, bipartisan consensus against torture,” said Human Rights First’s Raha Wala. “Torture violated our laws and betrayed our ideals. Now, no amount of loophole lawyering will be able to bring us back to the dark side.”
. . .
The amendment, designed to prevent any future administration from authorizing torture and other cruelty that violates domestic or international law, will:
Restrict the intelligence community—and the CIA in particular—to interrogation methods articulated in the Army Field Manual; and
Require that the International Committee of the Red Cross be provided notification of and access to detainees held in U.S. custody. |
Now for the important caveat: the Army Field Manual does not prohibit sleep deprivation, as long as the detainee receives a minimum of four hours of sleep per day. Nevertheless, if I subjected any one of you to a four-hour sleep regimen for 30 days straight, I believe you would complain you were being tortured. In this sense, 'torture' is still legal and may be practiced in the United States, even as a matter of Federal law. |
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Titus2
Joined: 06 Sep 2015
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| Posted: Mon Feb 15, 2016 9:33 pm Post subject: |
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| Leon wrote: |
| So I actually enjoyed having trump at the most recent Republican debate and was glad that someone was willing to call the Iraq war a disaster. |
To toot my own horn, I told you he'd do that. I also told you that average American republicans are ready to hear it. All it took was a dominant male to make it ok to openly speak of it. It will now be a mainline idea and we have the glorious Donald Trump to thank for it. Never doubt the power of a dominant male. It's programmed into our brains. He is entirely in charge of the narrative.
He'll demolish the entire regime consensus over the next 11 months. It's going to be amazing. Free trade - dead. Mass immigration - dead. Permanent war - dead. Corporate inversions - dead. Carried interest - dead. They'll have to kill him. Trillions of shekels on the line. |
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Plain Meaning
Joined: 18 Oct 2014
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| Posted: Tue Feb 16, 2016 3:00 am Post subject: |
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| Leon wrote: |
| So I actually enjoyed having Trump at the most recent Republican debate and was glad that someone was willing to call the Iraq war a disaster |
| Titus2 wrote: |
To toot my own horn, I told you he'd do that. I also told you that average American republicans are ready to hear it. All it took was a dominant male to make it ok to openly speak of it. It will now be a mainline idea and we have the glorious Donald Trump to thank for it. |
It is now a mainline idea in the Republican party? As in, four years ago, opposition to the Iraq War was totally anethema to "average American republicans?"
So winning second in Iowa is mainline but winning third is not? Winning New Hampshire outright is mainline but placing second there is not quite mainline?
Ron Paul Presidential Campaign
Ron Paul's position on the Iraq War at the time
Trump's position on Iraq War at the time |
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Leon
Joined: 31 May 2010
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| Posted: Tue Feb 16, 2016 5:16 am Post subject: |
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| Titus2 wrote: |
| Leon wrote: |
| So I actually enjoyed having trump at the most recent Republican debate and was glad that someone was willing to call the Iraq war a disaster. |
To toot my own horn, I told you he'd do that. I also told you that average American republicans are ready to hear it. All it took was a dominant male to make it ok to openly speak of it. It will now be a mainline idea and we have the glorious Donald Trump to thank for it. Never doubt the power of a dominant male. It's programmed into our brains. He is entirely in charge of the narrative.
He'll demolish the entire regime consensus over the next 11 months. It's going to be amazing. Free trade - dead. Mass immigration - dead. Permanent war - dead. Corporate inversions - dead. Carried interest - dead. They'll have to kill him. Trillions of shekels on the line. |
I think the idea that Iraq is a disaster is a mainline idea because to think otherwise is to be blind, deaf, and dumb. I could see people trying to squab,e about whether or not Obama or Bush is to blame, but this idea that it was a disaster is not a new idea from trump. |
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Titus2
Joined: 06 Sep 2015
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| Posted: Tue Feb 16, 2016 8:46 pm Post subject: |
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| Plain Meaning wrote: |
It is now a mainline idea in the Republican party? As in, four years ago, opposition to the Iraq War was totally anethema to "average American republicans?" |
Ron Paul was heretical but not a dominant personality. Weak men do not move ideas. This is why Ron Paul lost and why Bernie won't win. Trump is a very strong male who has absolutely incredible persuasion, media and marketing skills. Even people who disagree with him are being influenced. You'll see a lag as people work through their cognitive dissonance, but he killed the legitimacy of the neo-cohen permanent war machine during that debate. Men who move history do not behave like Ron Paul or Bernie Sanders.
Trump may lose, and I'm ok with him losing. It's more important that Americans start to see their government as an internationalist force that is actively working to ruin their lives for the benefit of oligarchs. That is the benefit of Trump.
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I think the idea that Iraq is a disaster is a mainline idea because to think otherwise is to be blind, deaf, and dumb.
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The Conservative movement/machine has spent a ton of money ensuring that the average R voter is deaf, blind and dumb. It has been very effective.
On an even better note, Trump is ending the Bush dynasty. Jeb might well eat a bullet. He's been publically humiliated over and over again. A whole batch of Republicans will be untouchable after this. |
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Titus2
Joined: 06 Sep 2015
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| Posted: Tue Feb 16, 2016 8:55 pm Post subject: |
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| Plain Meaning wrote: |
So winning second in Iowa is mainline but winning third is not? Winning New Hampshire outright is mainline but placing second there is not quite mainline?
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He made the major comments about Iraq after Iowa and NH.
Anyway, that's not the point. |
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The Cosmic Hum
Joined: 09 May 2003
Location: Sonic Space
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| Posted: Tue Feb 16, 2016 9:17 pm Post subject: |
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| Titus2 wrote: |
| Trump is a very strong male who has absolutely incredible persuasion, media and marketing skills. Even people who disagree with him are being influenced. |
So I gotta ask...do you really believe this? Really?
Trump is little more than an obnoxious bully with a lot of money. Grew up wealthy. Had everything given to him. His powers of persuasion, on intelligent people, would be near the zero mark. But is that one of your points? That to win this election, he needs only to influence the blind, deaf, dumb average American voter?
Not to say he won't win. I kinda hope he does. But that has more to do with how bad the other candidates are than with how 'incredible' he is.
Your message is clear about his message, but it seems you are over-rating him as a man...no? |
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