CHRIS CHRISTIE: Every morning when a United States Senator wakes up, they think about what kind of speech they can give, or what kind of bill they can drop.

Every morning when I wake up, I think about what kind of problem do I need to solve for the people who elected me. It is a much different experience...

Marco... You have not been involved in a consequential decision where you have had to be involved and accountable, you just simply haven't. 

And the fact is when you talk about Hezbollah sanctions act that you list as one of your accomplishments, which you just did, you weren't even there to vote for it. 

That's truancy. 

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2016/02/06/christie_vs_rubio_the_memorized_30-second_speech_where_you_talk_about_how_great_america_is_doesnt_solve_anything.html

From Chris Floyd

Donald Trump used his first nationally televised interview as president to declare his firm belief that “torture works.” Of course, as innumerable studies have shown, torture doesn’t “work” at all – if by “work” you mean the gathering of credible information. However, for Trump's purposes, torture will work very well indeed.  Thomas Jones, writing in the London Review of Books, points out this apt quote from Why Torture Doesn’t Work: The Neuroscience of Interrogation by Professor Shane O’Mara:

“The usual purpose of torture by state actors has not been the extraction of intentionally withheld information in the long-term memory systems of the noncompliant and unwilling. Instead, its purposes have been manifold: the extraction of confessions under duress, the subsequent validation of a suborned legal process by the predeterminedly guilty (‘they confessed!’), the spreading of terror, the acquisition and maintenance of power, the denial of epistemic beliefs.”

Gosh, it sorta makes you wish there had been some magical way for somebody -- say, the most powerful man on earth -- to have prosecuted American torturers during the last eight years, setting a clear, public example that such blatant evil would never again be tolerated in a civilized society. It's just so unfortunate that the White House and Justice Department were left empty from January 2009 to January 2017, and there was no one around to, you know, actually uphold the law. Darn the luck, eh?

But of course, there WAS someone in the White House during those years — and he and his minions used torture on an extensive scale. For example, it has been well documented that many thousands of children (and adults) have been psychological scarred by living under the constant threat of drone attack. This has been particularly true in Pakistan, where medical staff tell of children traumatized by the fear of the drones that constantly bombarded remote villages, especially in the earlier years of Obama’s presidency. Often the drones would simply sit in the sky above a village for hours on end, coming back for days on end, floating, buzzing, liable to let loose carnage at any moment. It is an exquisite form of torture, the equivalent of tying someone up then walking round and round them day and night while pointing a hair-trigger pistol at their head. And Obama inflicted this on hundreds of thousands of people, day after day, year after year. To what purpose? Why, the “spreading of terror,” of course.

read more:

http://www.chris-floyd.com/home/articles/no-comeback-for-torture-it-s-ne...

See toon at top...

Gina Haspel is almost certainly going to be the next director of the CIA. This shouldn’t happen, but it will. 

For those unfamiliar: Haspel was deputy head of the Agency under now-secretary of state Mike Pompeo. But that wasn’t her first job. She also oversaw the CIA torture programme in a secret black-site in Thailand. In 2005 she was promoted (probably because she’s really good at torturing people), and was then in charge of the CIA’s global network of torture sites.

This makes her a terrible person, but probably quite a good CIA agent.

Just to be clear, this is not a theory a rumor or a smear. Nobody debates these facts. This was her job. She supervised torture camps.

The response in the press is pretty disheartening, to be honest. Or, at least would have been, before reading the news and being outraged became my full-time unpaid job.

NBC said it makes her a “controversial” figure.

This story, from CNBC, went with a beautifully disgusting headline:

Trump picks Gina Haspel as first female CIA director—her history with torture could hamper her confirmation

Her “history with torture” doesn’t mean she should be in prison, doesn’t mean she’s an inhuman monster, doesn’t even make her exempt from government office, no. It just might be a bit of a complication. Like a drunk-driving conviction or an affair with a porn star. Torturing people is an embarrassing faux pas.

CNN reports:

She could be the first woman ever to run the CIA

…deciding to headline her genitalia rather than her long history of breaking international law. I would suggest “She could be the first torturer to ever run the CIA” as a better headline. It is, unfortunately, not true…but that’s never stopped CNN before.

The HuffPo at least has the sense to be seemingly undecided about it, just not in the way that you’d think:

Gina Haspel’s dark past makes her a complicated figure for feminists to support.

“Complicated” to support, is an interesting phrase. Some might have gone with “impossible” or “morally repugnant”. Trying to turn this into some kind of ethical quandary for feminists is offensive. Rather like the Guardian’s pitiful attempts to show the sympathetic side of the soldiers in the Abu Ghraib torture pictures.

Speaking of The Guardian…our trusty friend has a new story on Haspel today…its headline?

Gina Haspel must atone for her past to become CIA director

They don’t exactly say how one “atones” for a past as a professional torturer, but then this is The Guardian. There’s not to reason why, there’s just to puff out comfy certitude.

It refers to the detention and torture of people who were never charged or faced trial as “one of the darker chapters in modern US history”…which feels so much like simultaneous under and over statement, it’s actually hard to correct.

It’s NOT one of the darker chapters in US history, ancient or recent. But only because of everything else The Guardian refuses to report on. Torturing a few hundred people is nothing compared to starving 500,000 Iraqi children to death, when you think about it. 

The Western press tend to talk about torture as if it was a temporary blip, an accident. A speed bump on our moral high-road. It is none of those things. The West LOVES torture, we have a long tradition of it. The CIA wrote handbooks on it in the 1960s. America tortured people for decades before they got caught. They claim to have stopped now, but they would have claimed they never started…before the leaks happened. It’s almost certainly still going on. Believing otherwise is just naive.

Our side tortures people. People who probably don’t know anything and never did anything.

…not that being guilty or having information justifies torture. That’s the rhetorical trap the media sets around torture. The debate about “effectiveness”.

We don’t ban torture because it doesn’t work, just like we don’t eat babies because it’s expensive and we don’t ban slavery because it’s really hard to find good chains. Even addressing the pragmatic angle is inappropriate. Torture is wrong, and a civilised society does not question that fact.

Of course, the “moral ambiguities” around torture are only for our side. The other side have no ambiguity. If they use torture – even only allegedly – then they are evil. Assad’s (thus far theoretical) torture prisons are one of the reasons we should invade Syria. (You remember, Amnesty International recreated one using echo-location). Unfounded accusations of torture have been levelled at Cuba and Venezuela over the years too. 

It’s “torture” when they do it, you understand. Not “enhanced interrogation”. It’s “not who we are”, but it IS who THEY are.

For all that, Barack Obama remains the only modern leader to publicly admit to the use of torture. Remember that when the pronouncements about “our enemies” start flying around.

We have documented, and confessed, cases of using torture. Assad and Putin, Tehran and Beijing, Venezuela and Cuba, do not.

Read more:

https://off-guardian.org/2018/05/08/gina-haspel-and-the-normalising-of-t...

Read from top. See toon.

The protester who just got thrown out of Gina Haspel’s confirmation hearing used to brief Ronald Reagan every morning. 

Former CIA operative turned activist Ray McGovern got up at the Wednesday hearing on Capitol Hill and demanded answers from Haspel, acting head of the CIA and President Trump's nominee to replace Mike Pompeo as CIA chief. While she promised not to create another torture program, she alsowouldn’t condemn the previous one, including what happened at a CIA black site in the years after 9/11. When McGovern spoke up, at least five Capitol Police officers quickly detained him, warned him to stop resisting, and threw him out of the hearing in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

The hubbub started when Sen. Jack Reed, a Democrat from Rhode Island, asked Haspel about the morality of “enhanced interrogation techniques” (read: torture) and how she would react if one of her own officers were tortured. Would she consider a CIA officer being waterboarded by “terrorists” to be immoral? Reed wanted to know. 

“Sorry to interrupt here,” McGovern said, standing up in the audience. “Senator Wyden, you deserve a direct answer.” Wyden, however, wasn’t questioning Haspel at the time, so it’s unclear what McGovern was referring to.

Read more:

https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/evkg9e/former-cia-ray-mcgovern-prote...