Making this point even more strongly is former Guantanamo Defense Lawyer Alka Pradhan.
For example, writes Pradhan, “during the Bush administration, our use of torture wrecked our national security by weakening international alliances, degrading military operations, and even contributing to troop deaths (pdf).
“When he took office in 2009, [Former President Barack] Obama almost immediately declared he was ending the United States’ torture program,” she notes. “Yet the Obama administration refused to hold anyone from the Bush administration accountable, insisting that ‘we’re going to look forward, not backward.'”
[...]
While none of the Bush torturers ever faced the “reckoning” Obama promised, his administration did prosecute and imprison whistleblowers John Kiriakou and Chelsea Manning for revealing U.S. torture. As Pradhan notes:
Gina Haspel, who destroyed torture evidence at one of the CIA’s black sites, is now director of the CIA. Steven Bybee, who authored Justice Department memoranda permitting the use of torture on detainees, is now a 9th Circuit judge who ruled in favor of government immunity for torture. John Yoo, who infamously championed the president’s absolute power to crush the genitals of a child and now teaches at Berkeley Law, recently reappeared to apply his theory of absolute power to President Trump.
All of this, asserts Pradhan, has exacerbated a climate of impunity in which “the Trump administration has flouted the law on a nearly daily basis.” She writes:
The administration has created detention camps on the border, initiated illegal family separations that may never be rectified, and allowed police officers to kill Black Americans without consequence or censure. Most recently, the president created a false narrative regarding the election that led to threats of violence against elected officials.
“While these most recent events are shocking, they are also the direct consequences of the lack of government accountability committed under the guise of ‘national security’ that has been running rampant for decades,” writes Pradhan.
The crimes committed by this administration are too numerous to count. From the blatant corruption of Ryan Zinke, the damn illegal furniture set from Ben Carson, numerous and also sundry violations of the Hatch Act by Kellyanne Conway, Ivanka Trump and Peter Navarro.
It's a very basic tenet of Government Service that you don’t endorse or promote a private business while you work for the United States, and yet these people violated that principle over and over again.
With impunity.
Then you have the situation where the Trump Admin defied a direct Court Order to help reunite separated children by withholding phone numbers and addresses.
A federal judge is asking the Trump administration to explain why it took so long to provide additional contact information for the immigrant families it separated at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Earlier this week, the American Civil Liberties Union announced that the administration had finally provided a tranche of phone numbers and addresses needed to help reunite hundreds of families, information advocates had been requesting for nearly a year.
"This is disturbing in that it does seem to be readily available information," said U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw in a hearing held remotely on Friday.
This could be incompetence, but it could also have been criminal contempt of court. Frankly, I think it's the later.
And then, of course, you have maybe the biggest crime of all. You have the recent email that reveals members of the Trump admin were openly pursuing “Herd Immunity" which means deliberately allowing the infection to spread and potentially kill as many as 2 Million Americans.
Paul Alexander, a Trump appointee, urged senior officials to let “infants, kids, teens, young people, young adults, middle aged [people]” get infected with COVID-19 to create “herd immunity,” according to emails obtained by the House Subcommittee on the Coronavirus.
The revelation comes on the heels of the discovery by the subcommittee that CDC Director Robert Redfield allegedly directed his underlings to delete another Alexander email warning the CDC to keep quiet about COVID-19 spread among children because it was damaging to the administration.
In the new tranche of emails, Alexander, who served as a senior adviser to HHS Secretary Alex Azar, urged Health and Human Services assistant secretary for public affairs Michael Caputo, Food and Drug Administrator Stephen Hahn and Redfield to allow mass infections.
Alexander was a top deputy to Caputo, the longtime Trump hype man and HHS official, and both men left the department in mid-September.
In a series of emails to Caputo and other HHS officials, he advocates “locking granny down” but letting young people roam free and get infected.
Kids aren’t immune to Covid. Nether are middle-aged people. They carry the virus and infect others who may have co-morbidity, or may become long haulers, or may die. This shit is unconscionable. It’s tantamount to negligent manslaughter.
But wait it gets worse. There was also the time that Jared Kushner specifically killed a national Covid testing plan because he felt it would “Help Democratic States."
Members of Jared Kushner's coronavirus task force considered a national-scale testing plan early in the US's coronavirus outbreak.
However, according to a new Vanity Fair report, the plan never came to be, partly because the task force thought it would be better politically to hold off.
The logic, a source told Vanity Fair, was that the virus would hit Democratic-voting areas hardest and that the damage could be blamed on governors instead.
In March and early April, Kushner, a senior White House adviser, led a task force, parallel to the White House's official efforts, to devise a plan to accelerate coronavirus testing and supply chains nationwide.
Ultimately, that was abandoned, and President Donald Trump shifted much of the responsibility for controlling outbreaks to individual states.
A public-health expert who was in regular contact with Kushner's team told Vanity Fair's Katherine Eban that political reasoning may have influenced the decision.
"The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy," the unnamed expert said.
So they basically sat back on the hands and let the states “struggle” with the issues of testing and contact tracing specifically for political reasons. What’s worse is that the Trump admin has been sitting and trying to hatch $14 Billion in contact tracing funds authorized by Congress.
THEY FUCKING LET PEOPLE DIE FOR POLITICS.
310,000 people and counting.
That is God Damn Manslaughter.
There are also now shortchanging certain states from getting the Covid Vaccine while millions of doses stack up on the shelves.
Officials from more than a dozen states say the Trump administration has informed them that next week’s Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine allotments to their jurisdictions are being substantially reduced, prompting confusion and outrage. The development comes even as Pfizer insists that it has millions of doses ready to ship if given instructions by the federal government.
[...]
But Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (D) tweeted Thursday that the CDC “has informed us that [Washington’s] vaccine allocation will be cut by 40% next week—and that all states are seeing similar cuts.”
“This is disruptive and frustrating,” Inslee added. “We need accurate, predictable numbers to plan and ensure on-the-ground success. No explanation was given.”
The Associated Press reported Friday that “California, where an explosion in cases is straining intensive care units to the breaking point, will receive 160,000 fewer vaccine doses than state officials had anticipated next week—a roughly 40% reduction.”
Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) said his state was also told it would receive a smaller shipment than expected, The Hill reported Thursday. In addition, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) on Wednesday said he “anticipates about half as many doses as was originally promised.”
All of that is on top of all the Stochastic Terrorism that Trump has been fomenting particularly with his bogus racist “Election Fraud” lies and various bullshit.
At the first presidential debate of the 2020 election, President Donald Trump shocked many viewers when he was given an opportunity to condemn white supremacists but declined. The president then told the Proud Boys, an alt-right hate organization, to “stand back” and “stand by.”
While Trump’s refusal to condemn white supremacists was the talk of the debate, his decision to skirt the subject is precisely in line with how he’s historically addressed violence on the part of hate groups and his supporters: He emboldens it.
As far back as 2015, Trump has been connected to documented acts of violence, with perpetrators claiming that he was even their inspiration. In fact, almost five dozen people, according to reports from the Guardian and ABC News, have enacted violence in Trump’s name.
In 2016, a white man told officers “Donald Trump will fix them” while being arrested for threatening his Black neighbors with a knife. That same year, a Florida man threatened to burn down a house next to his because a Muslim family purchased it, citing Trump’s Muslim ban made it a reason for “concern.” Then there are the more widely known examples, like Cesar Sayoc, who mailed 16 inoperative pipe bombs to Democratic leaders and referred to Trump as a “surrogate father”; and the mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, in 2019 that left 23 dead, where the shooter’s manifesto parroted Trump’s rhetoric about immigrants.
[...]
Trump has continually refused to recognize what’s at the core of this violence: hate nurtured under a tense national climate that he has helped cultivate.
Trump’s campaign rallies have always been incubation grounds for violence, the sites where Trump spewed hate speech that encouraged physical harm against dissenters. And as president, he has used his platform to encourage violence against American citizens, whether through the police and National Guard or militia groups. Just this year alone, Trump made it clear that protesters — those out demonstrating against police brutality and systemic racism — should be met with force.
As much as the president and his supporters have to paint the picture that the cities and suburbs will burn in violence under a Joe Biden presidency, Trump is the one who has repeatedly proven that he has no interest in promoting peace.
These people have to be held accountable for this shit. All of it. It may not be up to whoever Biden’s new Attorney General might be. With Trump contemplating tons of “preventative pardons" it might not be on his plate. State AG’s like Letitia James and the DC AG may have to take this up.
It's not about Politics, it's not about “getting even.” They have to uphold the rule of law. They have to seek Justice. This can’t be swept under the rug… again. We already know how that turned out.
Here are the events for this week.
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