Trump To His NSC: "Peel Me a Muslim, Would You?"

Our narcissistic president does stupid shit because someone got to him and told him something that he chooses to believe, or which tickles his fancy, which is about all the concerted cogitation that the man can expend before taking potentially disastrous steps. That's what you put into office, America.

“I have spoken, as recently as 24 hours ago, with people at the highest level of intelligence and I asked them the question: does torture work?” he told ABC reporter David Muir. “And the answer was: yes, absolutely.”

People at the highest level of intelligence is one of those dismal Trumpian bites of word salad that might mean something but probably don't, because the man wouldn't name who those "people" were. We know by now what "many people are saying" means, which is squat.

So our president it talking openly about torture and how he's inclined to do it.

With that as hors d'oeuvre, what should "spill into public view" early yesterday but a draft Executive Order advocating  the reinstatement of CIA "black sites," secret prisons around the world where we, the American commonwealth, famously tortured prisoners under the presidency of Dick Cheney. The draft Executive Order evidently came out of Trump's National Security Council (NSC) and was distributed via email (oh boy!) to NSC members. I cannot for the life of me imagine that such a thing got written and distributed without the express or tacit approval of Trump.

The Trump people are embarrassed about the leak (as they should be!), are denying that they or anybody they knew wrote the thing or caused it to be circulated, but anonymous White House sources are saying the denials are simply a lie. Trump's people are embarrassed but not Trump. He goes on national tv and brags he's up for some torture as soon as his cabinet-level guys ask for it. And it'll be the best torture, like no one has ever tortured before. The best!

Gen. Michael Flynn,
Trump's NSC advisor

Whatever happens -- and so far (at least, for public consumption) Trump's Sec. of Defense and his new CIA director say they will not participate in torture -- whatever happens and ends up coming out into public view, we have a sonovabitch as president who is capable of absolutely anything, especially depending on who was the last sonovabitch who told him something he liked hearing.

Because he himself is incapable of thinking with any human insight or foresight or just plain sight that doesn't involve gilded walls and trophy wives.

The ineffable Kevin Siers, Charlotte Observer

Why Is This Woman Laughing?

MSNBC

Nicole Wallace was President George W. Bush's chief of communications, and now she's a regular panel member on MSNBC's Morning Joe. Yesterday, with the Senate Intelligence Committee’s so-called torture report still hours from public release, Wallace had an emotional tantrum at the very thought that anyone -- well, "liberals" mainly -- would object to what went on during her former boss's regime.

So Wallace led off her tantrum, waving the bloody flag of 9/11: "In the history of this country, I think months after 9/11, there were three people who we thought knew about imminent attacks and we did whatever we had to do.” Three people? Not according to the report. Wallace then did what every conservative does, invoked God on the side of torture and "American exceptionalism":  “I pray to God that until the end of time, we do whatever we have to do to find out what’s happening.” It was “asinine” and “dangerous,” she added, to claim that systematic torture “makes America less great,” because God, as we know, supports everything our exceptional nation does. 

All that matters, Wallace argued, is whether torture “help[s] us kill people who want to kill us.” But liberals, she complained, want to focus on “political correctness” — i.e., not committing war crimes.

“I don’t care what we did,” Wallace ended, thus admitting, inadvertently and unnecessarily, that she didn't know what she was even talking about.

I don't care what we did. That statement effectively sums up the public stance of her former boss, not to mention his cumulative intellectual acuity.

It also sums up, apparently and unfortunately, the limpness of the Obama administration's decision not to prosecute anything done during the previous administration, from bank fraud to "rectal feeding" of prisoners.

Let's bring I don't care what we did into the present tense: I don't care what we do. Obama pursues his drone-attack program, with all its lovely collateral damage, as though six, seven years from now another Senate Intelligence Committee report won't be detailing how heinous it all in fact was.

Torture. It's Not Just For Republicans Any More

We now have the public spectacle of an ex-president bragging that he authorized torture. "Damn right!"

It's infuriating that no one in the Obama administration says a word in response. No one with a justice or human rights portfolio, no one the least embarrassed that our legacy in the world is now stamped forever.

Complicity in torture is like any other complicity. Silence is assent.