Date: Saturday, 03 August 2024
https://ericzuesse.substack.com/p/why-donald-trump-must-not-be-the
https://theduran.com/why-donald-trump-must-not-be-the-president-again/
Why Donald Trump Must Not Be the President Again
Eric Zuesse (blogs at https://theduran.com/author/eric-zuesse/)
The basic reason is the way that he thinks, his process of analyzing things. It violates — it ignores — the intent of the authors of the U.S. Constitution and of its Amendments; and, so, it violates the fundamental Law of this country — it violates the intent of the individuals who collectively authored those documents, and which they embodied in those words. It is anti-American, in that sense, which is the deepest possible sense; and, so, he is a very dangerous person to entrust with this office. And that’s because of his process of analyzing things — which ignores the Constitution that EVERY President has taken an oath to represent.
Examples will here be cited and discussed, focusing around one topic that he often speaks about: torture.
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https://archive.is/nyjsc
26 January 2016
TRANSCRIPT: ABC News anchor David Muir interviews President Trump
David Muir’s interview with President Trump on Jan. 25, 2017.
https://archive.is/nyjsc#selection-3381.1-3412.0
DAVID MUIR: Do you want waterboarding?
PRESIDENT TRUMP: I don't want people to chop off the citizens or anybody's heads in the Middle East. Okay? Because they're Christian or Muslim or anything else. I don't want -- look, you are old enough to have seen a time that was much different. You never saw heads chopped off until a few years ago.
Now they chop 'em off and they put 'em on camera and they send 'em all over the world. So we have that and we're not allowed to do anything. We're not playing on an even field. I will say this, I will rely on Pompeo and Mattis and my group. And if they don't wanna do, that's fine. If they do wanna do, then I will work for that end.
I wanna do everything within the bounds of what you're allowed to do legally. But do I feel it works? Absolutely I feel it works. Have I spoken to people at the top levels and people that have seen it work? I haven't seen it work. But I think it works.
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Torture has been the traditional way that tyrants have forced individuals to testify in the way that the tyrant wants them to testify. In tyrannical regimes, it is the main way to obtain confessions, and is the main way to obtain testimony to convict other individuals whom the tyrant wants to imprison or execute. Thus, a “jail-house snitch” is often let off with a reduced sentence because he gave false ‘witness’ against someone whom the tyrant targets for imprisonment or death. The “snitch” is being used by the tyrant so as to eliminate someone whom the tyrant wants to eliminate, and to do it legally, so as to fool the public to believe that their Government represents the public instead of represents the tyrant.
Endorsers of waterboarding allege that it is not torture, but they lie: waterboarding is used in order to force a person to provide not the truth but the testimony that the torturer has been instructed by the torturer’s boss to extract from that victim. George W. Bush was a famous defender of waterboarding, because he was a pathological liar, and Trump is the same, but waterboarding is OBVIOUSLY a method of torture; and, so, it violates not only several provisions of the U.S. Constitution but also a U.S. law, “The Torture Act,” otherwise known as “18 U.S. Code § 2340A - Torture”, which applied “only to conduct occurring on or after November 20, 1994” and thus applied to both Trump and GW Bush (though the traitors in Congess never even impeached either of them for it: there is no accountability, at all, in America’s aristocratic dictatorship). In fact: the statute, the “TORTURE Act,” includes “(c) Conspiracy.-A person who conspires to commit an offense under this section shall be subject to the same penalties (other than the penalty of death) as the penalties prescribed for the offense, the commission of which was the object of the conspiracy.” So: that certainly includes GW Bush, but does it also include Trump? As our President, he appointed one of Bush’s chief torturers, Gina Haspel, as Director of the CIA, to oversee what? More torture? Maybe, but we don’t know. Trump was even to the right of Bush (and far to the right of John McCain) on this matter: “‘What do you think about waterboarding?’ Trump asked the crowd, which cheered his answer: ‘I like it a lot. I don’t think it’s tough enough.’ At a Republican primary debate in February [2016], Trump vowed that he would ‘bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding.’” So: even Bush’s demand to extract the required ‘evidence’ from captives wasn’t macho enough to satisfy Trump. These tyrants are just power-cravers, like most other tyrants throughout history have been. Maybe this has become normal in post-WW2 America, but it isn’t the way America was prior to 1945, when its Constitution actually MEANT something.
The Senate vote to confirm Haspel’s appointment (50% would have been enough) was fairly close, 54 to 45, but the even bigger story was that even many of the Democrats who voted against her were actually for her, but needed to vote against her in order not to lose too many of their own voters at election-time. In such a corrupt — aristocratic — system as post-1945 America, successful politicians fool voters far more than serve voters. Their public promises to the electorate mean essentially nothing. But their private promises to their megadonors mean virtually everything. And that is how this system works.
Trump’s statement to ABC News, that, “I will rely on Pompeo and Mattis and my group. And if they don't wanna do, that's fine. If they do wanna do, then I will work for that end.” and that, “Absolutely I feel it works. Have I spoken to people at the top levels and people that have seen it work? I haven't seen it work. But I think it works.” BOTH displayed not merely his false belief that torture is the way to extract truth from a captive, but also his cavalier attitude toward the scientific evidence, WHICH PROVES THAT TORTURE — WHEN IT SUCCEEDS — EXTRACTS LIES (because that is what its PURPOSE is) far more than it extracts truths. It leads investigators off onto wild-goose chases, after unlucky innocents, far more than to forensically productive leads. In 1992, the U.S. Army concluded that torture “is a poor technique that yields unreliable results, may damage subsequent collection efforts, and can induce the source to say what he thinks the interrogator wants to hear.” Obviously, anyone who has such a casual interest in the public’s welfare as to ignore the relevant science — not even to at least spot-check in order to verify for himself what his subordinates are saying to him — will be surrounded only by “Yes”-people who confirm his own prejudices. Trump is not, and never was, qualified to be America’s President.
Some idiots think that individuals such as Bush and Trump like torture because they are sadists; but that’s ridiculous, because the only persons who might actually get a sadistic rush from torturing others are the low-level servants of the tyrant — the ones who actually APPLY the torture. For the tyrant him or her self, the rush is instead for POWER. And their entire system is set up to serve THAT purpose. Few aristocrats are sadists, but almost all of them crave to exercise power — ESPECIALLY the power to serve THEMSELVES.
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.
