Once the Senate "acquits" President Trump of his abuse of power asking a foreign power to help him win the 2020 election, Trump can do ANYTHING, and he will do worse. War crimes are easy!
Trump has talked about committing war crimes in his campaign for the Presidency, and lately he has said he'd like to commit war crimes against Iran. o follow thru on his fake tough guy visage.
Trump is not tough by saying he can be as bad as ISIS. To the contrary. Wanting to be like ISIS shows him to be a coward.
Every true American, true Patriot, excluding the racists, White Nationalist, the KKK, and other extremists, decided long ago that beheadings, killing families, blowing up historic cultural sights, shooting POWs, stabbing POWs, torture, kidnapping women to make them sex slaves for the soldiers, and burning people alive was not showing bravery.
Trump was so afraid to go to war he developed "bone spurs," so asking why our military cannot do what ISIS does is a coward's question.
Trump is getting war crimes by proxy thru the Saudi's as they commit war crimes by killing Yemeni civilians. It is felt that killing the rebels in Yemen we are weakening Iran, but the Saudi's are committing war crimes.
War crimes by proxy are a "win-win" in Trump's transactional world. Trump has plausible deniability and America sells billions of dollars of weapons to the Saudis and the Saudis lower oil prices. The Saudis get our weapons to kill people.
It is a small step from bribing a foreign power, assassinating an Iranian leader, calling all Free Speech media traitors, threatening to commit war crimes, to creating a secret police to take out people on Trump's enemies list.
If you thought Trump was scary before the impeachment, wait until he gets a green light from the Senate and the majority of the GOP!
"Donald Trump Is the War Crimes President"
By Andrew Sullivan 10 Jan 2020
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/01/andrew-sullivan-donald-trump-is-the-war-crimes-president.html
"I saw the gripping New York Times documentary on Hulu this past week about the case of Navy SEAL Commander Eddie Gallagher, a rogue soldier who routinely shot civilians in Iraq for the hell of it, and finally stabbed to death a barely conscious captive young ISIS fighter who was the lone survivor of a missile hit on an enemy house. The documentary has video of the testimonies of his fellow SEALs, all of whom were in obvious anguish and pain as they told the truth to investigators. It also shows a photograph of Gallagher holding up the murdered kid’s head like a trophy in a wild-game hunt."
More.
" . . . the United States abandoned the Geneva Conventions it had once been instrumental in creating [under George Bush]. And this continued under the Obama administration.
More.
" . . . in 2016, a presidential candidate emerged who openly espoused torture as something he would bring back if he were elected. Suddenly, this felt like a legitimate debate. And it was unsurprising that this position won support from Republican primary voters, as if it were just one of many policy proposals, and not an unthinkable violation of domestic and international law."
More.
" . . . Trump’s position was not a reluctant one. He exulted in it, telling war crime stories on the stump, in particular the apocryphal one of General Pershing killing Muslims with bullets dipped in the blood of pigs to terrorize others.
Only Jim Mattis was able to restrain the commander-in-chief from restoring the torture program, even if it is clear that Trump still regards war crimes as a sign of strength."
More.
Trump nominated and the Senate approved Gina Haspel, who was deeply involved in the torture program, as the director of the CIA. The U.S. had gone from ignoring torture to symbolically legitimizing it."
More.
"After a group of six Navy SEALs decided, in great anguish, to report their murderous platoon chief for war crimes, and Gallagher was arrested and arraigned, Gallagher’s brother, Sean, went on Fox & Friends and appealed to Trump to step in. Trump first said he might pardon him after the trial. In that trial, one witness, given total immunity, reversed six previous testimonies and said he — and not Gallagher — killed the prisoner, by asphyxiating him by blocking the ventilating tube. The witness, asked why had suddenly changed his story, said he did not want Gallagher or his family to go through a life prison sentence without parole. That very day, for the first time, Gallagher came to court with his family.
Gallagher was acquitted, except for the charge of arranging the photograph of what he called a “deer kill,” holding the dead kid’s head up as a trophy. When the Navy, in a final weak attempt to punish him, tried to take Gallagher’s SEAL pin away from him, Trump personally intervened and insisted this war criminal would keep his pin, and that he was one of the “great fighters” in the U.S. military. Fox News celebrated, and Gallagher brazenly called those with the courage to turn him in cowards who fled from combat. Gallagher is now a celebrity in the Trump cult, and hawks T-shirts online with the slogan “Waterboarding Instructor.”
A president who believes a war criminal is among the finest fighters the U.S. has and suggests he will pardon him after his trial is, quite simply, unique in the history of the U.S. So too is a president who threatens another country with the destruction of its cultural sites in revenge for any response to the assassination of one of its military and political leaders. In mere decades, we went from the architect and guardian of the Geneva Conventions to their nemesis. The professional military, who serve with honor, are doing their best to resist, as those honorable SEALs did in the Gallagher case. The Pentagon quickly contradicted the president: “We will follow the laws of armed conflict,” said Defense Secretary Mark Esper on Monday."
The world once knew that the U.S. government would do its best always to follow those laws. There are likely to be war crimes in any real-world conflict, and the U.S. has committed its share of them. But George W. Bush was the first president to directly authorize something that George Washington had ruled out of bounds in the Revolutionary War. Washington’s words ring ever more tragically in the age of Trump: “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 require. Should it extend to death itself, it will not be disproportional to its guilt at such a time and in such a cause … for by such conduct they bring shame, disgrace and ruin to themselves and their country.”
Military honor and the laws of war are the mark of civilization, and something that takes centuries to build and one feckless decision to destroy. For an American president actually to celebrate such crimes, and even personally threaten to commit them, was unimaginable before now, before the shame and disgrace of Trump.
America will never be the same given Trump's notion of "strength."
And if anyone wonders why the United States has issues with Iran, ask the United States CIA. The United States earned Iran's hate.
"In declassified document, CIA acknowledges role in '53 Iran coup"
By Dan Merica and Jason Hanna, CNN
Updated 11:16 PM ET, Mon August 19, 2013
https://www.cnn.com/2013/08/19/politics/cia-iran-1953-coup/index.html
"64 Years Later, CIA Finally Releases Details of Iranian Coup"
New documents reveal how the CIA attempted to call off the failing coup — only to be salvaged at the last minute by an insubordinate spy.
By Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian - June 20, 2017, 1:43 PM
"Key Events in the 1953 Coup"
[Excellent information of US meddling for money and oil. The US interferes in other countries' governance for greed]
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/world/mideast/041600iran-coup-timeline.html
