From Otto’s War Room:
Usually when a crack-pot presidential candidate, say Donald Trump, says "we should bring back torture" I jump right on it. But there are two reasons why I'm not as pumped up about this:
First Trump is an idiot. A lot of people can see this including the more intelligent Republicans. The mainstream Republican establishment really hates Trump. His is undisciplined and shoots his mouth off without really caring what THEY think. This is one reason I actually like Trump. No I would not actually vote for him nor campaign for him in anyway. But I like how he is exposing the Republicans for the racist-xenophobic Bigoted-tyrants they really are. That is not to say he does that on purpose, but he does it none-the-less.
Second the US has never really stopped using torture. Interrogators have been caught using waterboarding and other criminal acts in the past. But they are masters of manipulation and that is not going to change with or without Trump.
As for exposing the Republicans for the racist-xenophobic Bigoted-tyrants they really are, here is what the McClatchyDC said:
" Trump has become famous this campaign season for making incendiary statements, from accusing Mexican immigrants of being rapists to urging a ban on all Muslims entering the country. But his recent pledge to return “enhanced interrogation techniques” to the methods U.S. interrogators can employ has sent ripples across the country’s close-knit circle of forensic psychologists, intelligence analysts and terror experts inside the government and beyond......
.....“I’m not really surprised because Mr. Trump is just catering to his voters,” Ali Soufan, a pioneering former FBI interrogator who in Senate testimony in May 2009 accused the CIA of having lied about the success of its brutal techniques, told McClatchy. “He appears to be running on a war-crimes platform. This is possible because, unfortunately, no one has been held accountable for our past torture, and when you don’t have people being held accountable, others are going to repeat it.”
EXECUTIVE ORDER 13491, ISSUED BY PRESIDENT OBAMA IN JANUARY 2009 TWO DAYS INTO OFFICE, ENDED THE BUSH-ERA CIA INTERROGATION
So there is already wording to the affect that Trump is all those bad things. Even the news media is not surprised. But more than that we see admission that nothing was ever done about the use of torture in the past and manipulating people using dirty tricks or mind tricks is something the US intelligence community (mostly our CIA) is really good at.
For example:
"Maria Hartwig, a psychology professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice just blocks from Trump Tower in midtown Manhattan, said Trump’s debate comments alarmed her.
“I think it’s disgraceful and worrisome,” said Hartwig, a leading academic expert on police and intelligence interrogations. “It betrays a complete lack of understanding about the nature of intelligence-gathering. Torture, in short, has repeatedly been categorized by professional interrogators as an amateur approach. It’s simply not an effective way of getting diagnostic information.”
And on the subject of modern day interrogation techniques:
“Everything that we do, all the techniques that we employ and train, are humane, lawful and based on the world-class research that we’re doing,” Frazier Thompson, the group’s director, told McClatchy on Wednesday. “And what that world-class research says and has shown to us is that the rapport-based techniques . . . will elicit more credible intelligence and evidence than any other type of technique. So that’s how we operate.”
They claim it is humane and legal, but I wouldn't count on that. The CIA and all of the US intelligence community has never been honest to the American people. Lies and deception are just part of what those people do. There is no reason to believe that torture is behind us now. It reappeared in recent years and will reappear again. We do know from all the dirty tricks the Republicans use to manipulate voters, all the mind games they are capable of producing. We see it every election season. It is not honest, nor fair. And the tricks they use on opponents of the empire are sure to be as clever and diabolical as they use on the voters. An empire by its very nature is dishonest and cruel. Nothing can change that accept to oppose the empire. And the US IS an empire.
