The Party Of Torture
canada goose store “Should any American soldier be so base and infamous as to injure any [prisoner]… I do most earnestly enjoin you to bring him to such severe and exemplary punishment as the enormity of the crime may requirefor by such conduct they bring shame, disgrace and ruin to themselves and their country.” canada goose store
George Washington wrote that in 1775, during the Revolutionary War, when foreign troops were occupying American soil and the fate of the incipient country was more uncertain than it would ever be again. Washington could easily have argued that torturing prisoners was necessary because of the state of emergency; he could have said that American survival depended on harsh and merciless treatment of the enemy. Instead, he argued the opposite: The country, he said, would be ruined, not by military defeat or excessive mercy, but by torture.
canadian goose jacket Now, some 240 years after Washington’s warning, we know that he was right. Torture has in fact led us to shame, disgrace and ruin. As part of the “War on Terror,” the Bush administration abandoned Washington’s dictum and embraced torture. canadian goose jacket
The direct line from torture and Trump was underlined this week, when the president chose Gina Haspel to replace Mike Pompeo as CIA director. In 2002, Haspel ran a CIA black site prison in Thailand where canada goose outlet agents under her command waterboarded and physically beat prisoners. She also destroyed videotapes of torture, covering up the extent to which the CIA violated the Geneva Conventions and American law.
Haspel was hardly acting alone. The CIA tortured suspects because the Bush administration told it to. It created black sites, where detainees were held in secret, without charges and without oversight by human rights organizations. diplomacy canada goose factory outlet in the Middle East for more than a decade.
Canada Goose Jackets But the canada goose outlet nyc use of torture had arguably even worse effects. Because GOP leaders argued for torture, GOP aligned media figures rushed to defend the practice. Consider just one example: Charles Krauthammer at the Weekly Standard insisted that “breaking the laws of war and abusing civilians are what, to understate the matter vastly, terrorists do for a living. They are entitled, therefore, to nothing.” Canada Goose Jackets
Canada Goose sale In a similar manner, Republican voters began to embrace torture as a partisan position. Support for torture skyrocketed among Republicans from around 51 percent in 2003 to 71 percent in 2013. Among Democrats, support grew as canada goose clothing uk well, but more modestly, from 39 percent to 45 percent. Canada Goose sale
buy canada goose jacket The change in public opinion is significant in part because it suggests a change in how Americans and especially Republicans see America and understand American identity. has a long and despicable record of torture and violence, from the brutal violence of slaveholders (like Washington himself) to the treatment of prisoners under mass incarceration. buy canada goose jacket
buy canada goose jacket cheap But no matter how duplicitous, the verbal rejection of torture established some lines and some canada goose factory outlet vancouver norms. It created a benchmark, at least, by which to see hypocrisy as hypocrisy. Before Bush, when we tortured, there was a standard, and a weight of public opinion, by which to judge that torture wrong. Trump, predictably, has canada goose outlet edmonton said that waterboarding “works.” He’s endorsed canada goose parka uk murdering the families of ISIS fighters. buy canada goose jacket cheap
canada goose factory sale Beyond these obvious examples, Trump’s presidency is defined by the logic of torture in a broader sense. The basic premise of Bush era torture was that security was more important than human rights. “If it takes dunking a terrorist in water, we’re all for it if it saves American lives,” former Vice President Dick Cheney insistedin one of his many proto Trump declarations. canada goose factory sale
Canada Goose Parka In this worldview, protecting our own justified any excess of violence. For Cheney, the core of Americanism was not human rights or liberty, but canada goose outlet seattle tribalism and fear. Canada Goose Parka
And that is canada goose outlet michigan the core of (an ever more narrowly defined) Americanism for Trump, too. Vague fears of terrorism justify banning refugees who may face torture or death at home. Vague fears of crime, or of job losses, justify detaining pregnant women labeled as undocumented and holding them without proper medical care. In the name of American security, you can commit any atrocity or violate any right.
Canada Goose Outlet Again, America is not new to https://www.canadagoosejacketsalesca.co.uk that logic. We live in a country, after all, that has spent the last few decades building the largest gulag the world has ever seen. But it’s a part that the Republican party has been canada goose jacket outlet uk assiduously cultivating for some time. In appointing Haspel, Trump is nodding consciously or not to the fascist Republican policies that opened the Oval Office to a xenophobic grifter in the first place. As Washington warned it would, Bush’s base and infamous willingness to harm enemy prisoners has led the country to ruin. First you’re the party of torture, then you’re the party of Trump Canada Goose Outlet.