Donald Trump is bringing torture back: His entire foreign-policy team are big fans of the worst...

[DonViejo]

Donald Trump is bringing torture back: His entire foreign-policy team are big fans of the worst Bush-era practices

Potential CIA head Pete Hoekstra, like many others around Trump, wants to "work out" a policy for American torture

HEATHER DIGBY PARTON

One of the most active conversations these days among political activists who oppose Donald Trump is about the extent to which Democrats should “work with” the new president, considering his white nationalist, authoritarian campaign and the people with whom he has surrounded himself. It’s both a strategic and a moral question, and the potential complications and rewards run in a number of different directions. Salon’s Simon Maloy addressed some of the problems in this piece on Thursday.

I tend to be in the “resist across the board” camp, because I greatly fear the normalization of the Trump administration. By normalization I mean not only the adoption of his draconian policies and cretinous behaviors as acceptable for leaders in our democracy, but also the abandonment of long-held norms that held the whole thing together. You cannot have a civil society based only on laws. People must believe that a basic level of decency and trust exists among our fellow human beings or it just doesn’t work. (Brian Beutler explores this subject in depth in this piece for the New Republic.)

But let’s be honest. Trump is not the first leader to break with the norms we all took for granted. Republicans have been pushing that envelope ever since they came into power in 1994 and used their House majority to stage a years-long witch hunt against Bill Clinton, which culminated in an embarrassing sideshow of an impeachment over a private sexual matter. They followed up by seizing the presidency under very dubious circumstances, blatantly using the levers of power, both partisan and familial, to do it. Then came the Iraq war, the most abusive break with norms of all, a deeply immoral decision to use a catastrophic terrorist attack as an excuse to fulfill a long-held, but irrelevant, foreign policy objective. We’ve been on shaky ground for a while.

But in my mind for all the broken norms, the one that is the most destructive of moral authority and civilization is the normalization of torture. I still find it stunning that we talk about it matter-of-factly as if it were an argument about whether or not to fund a highway bill rather than the grotesquely sadistic practice it is. A prohibition against torture wasn’t just a “norm” — torture was taboo, something so far outside of our understanding of right and wrong that it was beyond discussion, like pedophilia or cannibalism.

more
http://www.salon.com/2016/11/18/donald-trump-is-bringing-torture-back-his-entire-foreign-policy-team-are-big-fans-of-the-worst-bush-era-practices/

[MFM008]

1. Just indict them of

War crimes now and save the trouble later.

[dixiegrrrrl]

2. That 2nd paragraph is vital:

I greatly fear the normalization of the Trump administration.
By normalization I mean not only the adoption of his draconian policies and cretinous behaviors as acceptable for leaders in our democracy, but also the abandonment of long-held norms that held the whole thing together.
You cannot have a civil society based only on laws. People must believe that a basic level of decency and trust exists among our fellow human beings or it just doesn’t work.

gonna share that thought, far and wide.