Max Boot, the noted Washington Post columnist, and "Jeane Kilpatrick senior fellow for National Security Studies" at the Council for Foreign Relations, thinks Donald Trump is betraying American values by meeting with Kim Jong-Un. Such a meeting, Boot says, would mean "giving the worst human-rights abuser on the planet what he most wants: international legitimacy."

Let's unpack that one for a minute. We're worried now about giving human rights abusers legitimacy?

The idea that we don't legitimize human-rights abusers is a laugh-out-loud joke everywhere outside America. You could fill a book chapter with the history of the friendly relations between American presidents and just the foreign dictators who are credibly reported to have eaten other human beings.

Here's a cheery letter from Gerald Ford inviting Central African Republic dictator Jean-Bedel Bokassa (the remains of 30 people were found in his crocodile pond upon ouster) to Washington.

We helped install Idi Amin, too. He later denied rumors of cannibalism, saying human flesh was "too salty," but he had other equally upsetting hobbies. We've supported a couple of generations of Nguemas in Equatorial Guinea, both of whom - uncle Macias and nephew Teodoro Obiang - reportedly ate their political enemies.

This is in addition to the countless Batistas and Suhartos and Diems and Marcoses and Pinochets who were just murdering thieving monsters we legitimized not by sitting down with them at the negotiating table, but by making them allies we showered with things like arms and money.

The problem with Trump is that he's too stupid to be embarrassed by such relationships. He constantly makes all of Washington look bad by jumping too enthusiastically in bed with the blood-soaked juntas and anti-democratic governments we more quietly embraced in the past.

Over the weekend, for instance, Trump horrified progressives when he called for the death penalty for drug dealers, an idea he said he got from Chinese President Xi Jinping. "I don't know if this country's ready for it," Trump moaned.

This is monstrous, of course, and God help us if we actually try to enact this policy.

But the fact that we're so tight with repressive China to begin with is on Trump's predecessors, who should have taken a harder line on human rights issues a long time ago.

For decades, American officials in both parties have overlooked China's horrific record on human rights. Both continually lobbied for China to keep receiving Most Favored Nation status and other trade benefits, largely because corporate donors wanted it.

The real measuring stick we use when it comes to determining whether a foreign regime is irredeemably monstrous or an important ally is whether the leaders we're talking about are our bastards, or their own bastards - puppets, or free-lancers.

Dictators who take the throne with our backing get weapons and cash. The ones who do it without our backing usually find themselves getting a nice healthy dose of regime change sooner or later.

Sometimes the offender starts out as an American lapdog only to leave the kennel and instantly become a Dangerous International Human Rights Offender.

Manuel Noriega was on the CIA payroll until 1988, but later became disobedient and found himself holed up in a nunnery listening to invading American troops blaring "I Fought the Law" (the Clash version, in a nice detail) as they waited for him to surrender.

Saddam Hussein was another friend-turned-target, as was Diem and a few others. The line between friend and pariah in our foreign policy is incredibly slim. It really has nothing to do with anything beyond the political utility, to America, of the regime in question.

This is why the debate over Trump meeting with Kim Jong-Un is so absurd. The crime here isn't meeting with a dictator - we snuggle up to worse creeps all the time - the crime is meeting with an out of pocket dictator.

Rachel Maddow last week struggled to articulate why she was so opposed to negotiations with North Korea. Her basic take seemed to be "Nobody has ever met with the dictator of North Korea, therefore nobody should ever meet with the dictator of North Korea."

A lot of self-described progressives seem to be agreeing with her. This is interesting, since the same idea was incredibly popular among the same audience not long ago.

On July 23rd, 2007, at the Citadel in South Carolina, Democratic presidential candidates held the first presidential debate of the 2008 election cycle. In it, an audience member asked if candidates would be willing to meet with leaders of countries like Syria, Iran, and North Korea.

"I would," Obama said. "And the reason is this: the notion that somehow not talking to countries is punishment to them, which has been the guiding diplomatic principle of [the Bush] administration, is ridiculous."

As a colleague pointed out to me over the weekend, this was one of the moments that first endeared progressives to Barack Obama, precisely because it defied bipartisan Washington consensus. True to form, after that debate, both Hillary Clinton and George Bush ("Some seem to think we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals") ripped Obama's naivete.

The idea that the United States does not negotiate in public until the enemy has already surrendered in private has long been a bedrock principle in D.C.

It's one of the reasons why people in other countries hate us so much. It's also why our "peace proposals" so often read like ultimatums.

A classic example was the Rambouillet deal presented to Slobodan Milosevic. Milosevic agreed to the key principle of an independent Kosovo, but didn't want the deal secured by NATO troops, as outlined. He preferred the occupying troops fly under a U.N. or an OSCE flag. We told him to take the deal or be bombed.

He wouldn't budge, we bombed him, and our news media consistently misreported this war-starting sequence of events. The New York Times went so far as to say Milosevic "absolutely refused to entertain an outside force in Kosovo."

The current consensus on North Korea is basically the same. It's said repeatedly we shouldn't countenance a meet with the mad dictator until the mad dictator agrees in advance to surrender. Doing anything else makes us look weak, and gives a PR win to a murderous autocrat. And we wouldn't want that!

The flamboyant horribleness of Trump is allowing warmongering, democracy-hating hacks on both sides of the aisle to rewrite history. They're penning a new creation story that dates America's embrace of murderous dictators to Trump's election.

"Another morning in America," sighed Paul Krugman, after Trump invited Egypt's ruthless Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to Washington last year, and called him a "fantastic guy." Politico chimed in: "Critics worry the president has a love for tyrants and little interest in promoting human rights and democracy."

What these people left out of their outrage is that we'd been supplying Sisi with jets and missiles since the Obama years. As The Intercept pointed out, exactly the same thing happened when Trump and Tillerson cozied up to the repressive Bahrain regime (who began receiving arms from us in 2015).

One of the constant themes we hear on social media and from pundits is that the press has to go the extra mile to avoid "normalizing" Donald Trump. The problem is that when it comes to embracing autocratic regimes, Trump actually is normal. We should be ashamed not just of him, but of the decades of votes we cast for politicians who did the same things.

We helped create the pre-condition for Trump by continually spreading the idea that it's OK to ally ourselves with leaders who abuse their subjects - who push dissenters out of airplanes, electrocute their genitals, bomb women and children, and so on - so long as our economic interests are protected.

I would love to be able to point a finger at Donald Trump and say, "The United States does not sit down with murderous dictators!"

But we can't say that, can we? Not with a straight face, anyway.
(c) 2018 Matt Taibbi is Rolling Stone's chief political reporter, Matt Taibbi's predecessors include the likes of journalistic giants Hunter S. Thompson and P.J. O'Rourke. Taibbi's 2004 campaign journal Spanking the Donkey cemented his status as an incisive, irreverent, zero-bullshit reporter. His books include Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History, The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion, Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire.

TOWARDS THE END of 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and declared war on the US. Their Nazi ally followed with its own declaration of war, and so did all its satellites.

The joke tells about the Hungarian ambassador in Washington who delivered his declaration of war to the Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, who decided to have some fun.

"Hungary, Hungary," Hull queried, "Are you a republic?"

"No," the ambassador corrected him, "We are a monarchy."

"Indeed? So who is your king?"

"We don't have a king, but a regent, Admiral Horthy."

"An admiral? So you have a large navy?"

"We have no navy at all, because we have no outlet to the ocean."

"Strange, a monarchy without a king, an admiral without a navy. So tell me, why are you declaring war on us? Do you have claims against the USA?"

"No, we have claims against Romania."

"So why don't you declare war on Romania?"

"We can't! Romania is our ally!"

Why?

God knows. I search desperately for a reason for the Israeli-Iranian conflict, a struggle of life and death, and do not find any. Nothing. Niente.

Wars between nations are based on conflicts of interest. Are there any conflicting interests between Israel and Iran?

None whatsoever.

Israel has a conflict with the Arab world, which refuses to recognize and have normal relations with it as long as there is no peace between Israel and the Palestinian people. Israel is now practically at war with Syria and Hezbollah.

Iran wants to be the dominant Muslim power in the region. Therefore it is practically at war with Saudi Arabia (which wants the same) and its satellites. That looks like a community of interests between Israel and Iran.

And indeed, not so long ago there was a strong - though unofficial - alliance between Iran and Israel. That was when the Shah ruled in Teheran. Israelis acted in Iran at will. Iran was the basis for Israel's extensive military and political activities in Iraqi Kurdistan. Shabak, the Israeli secret service, trained the feared Iranian secret service, Savak. Except for the USA, Iran was Israel's closest ally.

SO WHAT happened? Regime change in Iran, of course. The Shah was thrown out, the Ayatollahs came in. The Ayatollahs are religious leaders. In the name of Shi'ite Islam they curse the "Jewish State."

But religious ideology does not replace the basic interests of a state. These are based on objective facts, primarilly geographical ones. Even the religious wars of the 17th century arose mainly from national interest. Mostly, religion was just a pretext.

National interests do not change when a regime change occurs.

The most obvious example is Russia. When the Bolshevik revolution replaced the Czars, foreign policy did not change. When the Communist regime broke down and power eventually came to Vladimir Putin, the foreign policy continues more or less as if nothing has happened.

And indeed, when the vital interests of Iran were concerned, the Ayatollahs did not despise Israeli aid. During the Iraqi-Iranian war, Israel provided the ayatollahs with arms. That happened almost openly during the so-called "hostage crisis". The US sent arms to Israel, Israel sent them to Iran, in return Iran released the American hostages. My friend Amiram Nir, then a government security official, went to Teheran to deliver them.

The thought that Iran could possibly attack a nuclear power like Israel and risk its own annihilation is ludicrous.

Iran is the heiress to one of the world's most ancient civilizations, almost as ancient as Egypt. Compared to it, Jewish civilization is a younger sister. Indeed, many experts believe that the Jewish religion is heavily indebted to the Iranian civilization.

Cyrus "the Great" founded the largest empire in the world (until then). He created a system of tolerance and progress. As part of the effort he sent the banished Jews from Babylon back to Jerusalem. The "Return to Zion" was, as many experts believe, the real beginning of Judaism.

True, that was long, long ago. But, as mentioned above, objective interests have a very long life.

SO WHY do the Iranians curse us now? Why do they rain fire and brimstone on us?

Quite simple. The hatred for Israel is for the Iranians an instrument for the achievement of their real goals.

The real aim of the Iranians is to gain power over the entire Muslim Middle East. They are doing this systematically, with quite a lot of success. The logic goes like this: the Muslim world hates Israel. The Arab Middle East hates Israel. Therefore, the hatred of Israel can be an effective political instrument.

Curiously enough, Binyamin Netanyahu has adopted the same logic - only the other way round. Donald trump hates the ayatollahs. Many people in the Western world fear them. So Netanyahu has adopted hatred of Iran as his main political instrument. He goes around the world and peddles it everywhere. It is the main theme of his rousing speeches to the UN, the American Congress and AIPAC.

It is also a good remedy for his personal troubles. Netanyahu is now up to his neck in various corruption affairs, including large bribes. His admirers are ready to ignore them, because he is Israel's only bulwark against the terrible danger of annihilation by the ayatollahs riding on nuclear missiles.

Since President Trump also has a thing about Iran and wants to withdraw from the international agreement in which Iran undertook to suspend much of its nuclear program, in return for adequate concessions, Netanyahu's anti-Iranian ranting cements the companionship between the two.

Lately the Iranians have been establishing bases in Syria and Lebanon, near the borders of Israel. The Israeli air force is bombing them from time to time, proudly showing aerial photos proving their success. These attacks raise, of course, Iran's credibility in Arab eyes. Everybody is satisfied.

STILL, IT'S a dangerous situation. It is based on the Israeli-Arab conflict that could explode any minute in various ways. Israeli "military experts" prophesy another Israeli-Arab war soon, probably against Syria and Hezbollah. This week, air-raid sirens were tested all over this country.

The best way to avoid it is to make peace with the Arab world. That means to make peace first with the Palestinians.

Netanyahu proudly tells us that he has achieved a remarkable victory - cooperation with Saudi Arabia and the Arab Emirates, who are now involved in a shooting war with Yemeni insurgents who enjoy Iranian backing. The Saudis are nowhere near to winning that war.

This Israeli-Saudi cooperation is strictly secret. The Saudi crown prince, a very young and inexperienced dictator, cannot admit it, because the masses of Arabs everywhere, including his own kingdom, see Israel as the arch-enemy.

No Arab country can establish real peace with Israel, as long as Israel occupies all of Palestine and subjects the Palestinians to a cruel occupation regime. The old Saudi peace plan is still lying around somewhere, but it is totally ignored by the Israeli government.

True, Israel has signed peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan, but nothing even remotely resembling a thoroughgoing peace exists between us and these nations. The initial enthusiasm evaporated long ago, and both the Egyptian and the Jordanian governments keep relations to a minimum, aware that the masses of their peoples detest Israel.

There is just no way around the Palestinians.

Real friends of Israel should advise Netanyahu to make peace as long as Mahmoud Abbas (Abu-Mazen) is still around. In two weeks he will be 83 years old, and he is ailing. He is deeply committed to peace. He has no obvious successor, and his replacement may far, far less moderate.

But Netanyahu doesn't care. Peace is the last thing he has on his troubled mind. He is far more committed to the eternal conflict with both the Arabs and the Iranians.

The assassination of Rio de Janeiro city councilwoman Marielle Franco sent huge crowds of outraged mourners into the streets of Brazil, the western hemisphere's "blackest" nation, where more than half of the 210 million inhabitants describe themselves as preto (black) or pardo (partly African). The 38 year-old member of the Party of Socialism and Liberty (PSOL) and her driver were ambushed by hit men firing police-issued bullets, sending "a message to all black bodies that fight for rights in the favela," the besieged ghettos of Brazil's cities, said Black activist Marcelle Decothe.

Shaun King, writing in The Intercept, described Franco as, "for all intents and purposes, a leader of the country's parallel to the Black Lives Matter movement in the U.S."

In this week's issue of Black Agenda Report, Black Brazilian journalist and anthropologist Jaime A. Alves describes Franco, a lesbian with a 19 year-old daughter, as "fearlessly vocal against police terror. Days before her killing," Alves writes, "she denounced on twitter the disappearance of two youth kidnapped by the police in the neighboring favela of Acari. She was also leading the human rights commission to monitor police and military abuse during the military intervention decreed by president Michel Temer."

The Brazilian military ruled with an iron hand -- and U.S. backing -- from 1964 to 1985. The Temer regime remains hugely unpopular more than two years after the "legislative coup" that unseated the Workers Party government of Dilma Rousseff, throwing the nation into political turmoil. Some fear President Temer's handover of policing in Rio to the generals amounts to a creeping military coup. "I believe that this is one more step along the road of being able to restore security, order and, above all, confidence to residents of Rio de Janeiro state," said top Temer advisor Wellington Moreira Franco. "This spirit is being mobilized so that ... this methodology can spread throughout Brazil."

It is almost immaterial whether Marielle Franco was killed by the military or civilian police, or other henchmen; she was cut down by a white supremacist Brazilian state that is even more lethally racist than its counterpart in the northern hemisphere. Her death is an occasion for serious examination of the similarities and differences in the Black condition in Brazil and the United States, especially regarding police.

BAR contributor Jaime Alves believes the transfer of police duties to the military is a "test case for Brazil as a whole." But, he emphasizes, for Black activists, the favelas have always been under occupation. "Despite the regime of citizenship, decolonization is still to be completed" in the last major country in the world to abolish slavery, in 1888.

According to the official numbers, Brazil's police kill 4, 224 civilians a year. Alves asks us to "imagine a country where twelve civilians are 'legally' killed by the police on a daily basis." Seventy-six percent of the dead are Black, meaning nine Black men or boys are killed by Brazilian police every day (99 percent are male). Alves notes that these statistics "do not count the 'disappeared' and 'unknown' that have turned poor and predominantly black urban communities in Brazil into macabre geographies."

In the United States, cops killed 1,129 people in 2017, according to a Mapping Police Violence study, 305 of them Black people. That amounts to one Black person killed by cops every 29 hours -- less than one a day.

Brazil's Black population is over 100 million, two and a half times the U.S. Black population of 40 million. If the Black USA were as large as Black Brazil, the rate of cop killings of Blacks would be one every 11 and a half hours, or a little more than two deaths per day - still far below the Black Brazilian daily death toll of nine, but horrific on any national scale other than that which is weighted down by centuries of slavery, the organized mass grinding up and murder of entire peoples. Black lives in both Brazil and the U.S. are terminated by the state on a low-intensity warfare scale.

Clearly, the Brazilian state is conducting an even more lethal war against its Black population than its northern counterpart's militarized oppression of U.S. Blacks. There is plenty of room for debate on why this is so, but I submit that the historical militancy and relative solidarity of Blacks in the U.S. has been a great shield and spear against an unrelentingly hostile white society and state. Although Blacks in the U.S. constantly complain of a lack of solidarity and waning militancy among our people, the truth is that, compared to other populations of the African diaspora, we are collectively fierce! That's why Shaun King speaks of Marielle Franco as, "for all intents and purposes, a leader of the country's parallel to the Black Lives Matter movement in the U.S." - and not the other way around. There are Black Panther Party "parallels" in India -- and, as we note in this issue of BAR, in Puerto Rico -- and Black Americans are the model of Black militancy in most of the world. No other Black national group has waged repeated urban rebellions in the major cities of a modern, white-led capitalist state. The resilience of Black U.S. solidarity and militancy means there are political, economic and, sometimes, blood prices to be paid for crimes against this people - and the state knows it.

A key factor that distinguishes Black people in the U.S. from others in the diaspora is the historical absence of an independent mulatto class. The relatively high prices brought by the heavily securitized and fantastically profitable slave "stock" in the U.S. discouraged slaveholders from allowing the creation of such a class, while constantly reinforced white majorities eliminated the need to formalize a "buffer" population of mixed race persons in the United States. The slave descendants here are uniformly "Black" -- and consciously so. Our super-exploitation -- with no means to escape by "lightening" the race - was transformed into a near-unique level of solidarity.

Black Brazil is belatedly transforming, too - as is dramatically evident in the census numbers, themselves. There are many more "self-declared black" people -- as Alves describes Marielle Franco -- in Brazil than ever before, despite long periods of massive European immigration to that country, thanks to a Black movement largely inspired by its brothers and sisters in the United States.

Saudi Arabia's 32-year-old Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, heir to the Saudi throne after eliminating his rivals, is on a two-week whirlwind visit to the United States starting March 19. He plans to cement his ties to the Trump administration, shore up support for his war in Yemen while whipping up more opposition to Iran, and make lucrative business deals. From political meetings with Donald Trump and Congress to cultural events at DC's Kennedy Center, a talk at MIT, gatherings with tech leaders in Silicon Valley and oil executives in Houston, the prince will be selling dolled-up versions of both his repressive kingdom and his favorite product from the House of Saud: himself. But don't get sucked into the media hype, seeded by well-paid PR firms, that the prince is a reformer who is bringing substantive change to the kingdom.

MbS, as he is known from his initials, is really a brutal bully responsible for bombing and starving Yemenis. He's also gunning for a war with Iran, blaming Iran for the Middle East turmoil. Meanwhile, he recklessly imposed a blockade of Qatar that has divided the Gulf States and tried to force a bizarre showdown with Hezbollah in Lebanon by holding Prime Minister Hariri hostage. Recent reports reveal that he has even been holding his own mother under house arrest, hidden from her husband King Salman, for fear she would stand in the way of her son's ruthless power grab.

Yes, it is true that MbS is making some positive reforms. Women will soon be able to drive and the morality police are not as repressive. Movie theatres are opening, and more cultural events are allowed (although they must all pass government muster and most are gender-segregated). But these reforms are minor in the larger picture of a kingdom that brooks no dissent internally and is committing war crimes abroad. According to Human Rights Watch, "Mohammed bin Salman's well-funded image as a reformist falls flat in the face of Yemen's humanitarian catastrophe and scores of activists and political dissidents languishing in Saudi prisons on spurious charges. Baby steps on women's rights reforms don't paper over Saudi Arabia's systemic abuses."

The prince's most destructive policy is his war on Yemen (bin Salman is head of both the military and the economy). Started in March 2015 in what the prince thought would be a quick and dirty campaign to defeat the Houthi rebels, the relentless Saudi bombing campaign and restrictions on humanitarian aid have turned Yemen into the world's greatest humanitarian disaster. The US participation in this Yemen war includes selling the Saudis billions of dollars in weapons (Saudi Arabia is the number one purchaser of US weapons) and providing in-air refueling of their bomber planes. Bin Salman's visit is coming at precisely the time when the Senate is embroiled in a debate over Resolution 54, a bipartisan resolution that would end the unauthorized US military participation in the Yemen conflict. The prince will certainly use his visit to shore up support for the war, painting it as a fight against the Iran-backed Houthis rather than Saudi interference in Yemen's internal affairs.

To consolidate his power at home before the death of his father, King Salman, MbS has just pulled off a heist that would make bank robber Butch Cassidy green with envy. He rounded up hundreds of his rival elites and held them hostage in the gilded Ritz-Carlton Hotel until they turned over billions of dollars, real estate and shares of their companies to his control. According to a New York Times expose, some detainees were subjected to such physical abuse that 17 were hospitalized and one died in custody, with a neck that appeared twisted, a badly swollen body and other signs of abuse.

The whole affair was framed as a fight against corruption, but all transactions were conducted in secret and outside the law. Those who have been released are banned from travel and are afraid to denounce bin Salman for fear of further reprisals. Meanwhile, the prince who is portrayed as a Saudi Robin Hood taking from the elite to spread to the poor bought a $500 million yacht from a Russian vodka financier, a $300 million French chateau described as "the world's most expensive home," and a $450 million Leonardo da Vinci painting purchased at a Christie's auction-the most expensive painting ever sold.

So don't be fooled. Beneath the veneer of reform is a young man who believes that his bloodline gives him the right to become the next absolute monarch in a family that has ruled the nation with an iron fist since its founding in 1932. The Saudi kingdom is still governed by an intolerant version of Islam, Wahhabism, and spreads that ideology around the world. The government still represses the Shia minority and non-Muslims, and remains a country where atheism is a capital offense and all churches are banned. Free speech and free association are forbidden. There are no national elections and political parties are banned, as are unions and most civic organizations. Criticizing the Saudi regime can lead to flogging, harsh jail sentences or beheading.

While Saudi Arabia will soon lose the distinction of being the only country in the world where women can't drive, the regime continues to be the world's most misogynist, gender-segregated country. The guardianship system gives men authority over the most important decisions in women's lives, and women are forced to be covered in black from head to toe when they are out in public.

We already know that Jeff Sessions had severe memory lapses about his meetings with the Russian ambassador and he's broken his promise to recuse himself from anything to do with the Clinton foundation, which forms the basis of the McCabe firing for a "lack of candor."

Now it turns out he's had a "lack of candor" about something else ...

U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions' testimony that he opposed a proposal for President Donald Trump's 2016 campaign team to meet with Russians has been contradicted by three people who told Reuters they have spoken about the matter to investigators with Special Counsel Robert Mueller or congressional committees.

Sessions testified before Congress in November 2017 that he "pushed back" against the proposal made by former campaign adviser George Papadopoulos at a March 31, 2016 campaign meeting. Then a senator from Alabama, Sessions chaired the meeting as head of the Trump campaign's foreign policy team.

"Yes, I pushed back," Sessions told the House Judiciary Committee on Nov. 14, when asked whether he shut down Papadopoulos' proposed outreach to Russia. Sessions has since also been interviewed by Mueller.

Three people who attended the March campaign meeting told Reuters they gave their version of events to FBI agents or congressional investigators probing Russian interference in the 2016 election. Although the accounts they provided to Reuters differed in certain respects, all threes, who declined to be identified, said Sessions had expressed no objections to Papadopoulos' idea.

However, another meeting attendee, J.D. Gordon, who was the Trump campaign's director of national security, told media outlets including Reuters in November that Sessions strongly opposed Papadopoulos' proposal and said no one should speak of it again. In response to a request for comment, Gordon said on Saturday that he stood by his statement.

Sessions, through Justice Department spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores, declined to comment beyond his prior testimony. The special counsel's office also declined to comment. Spokeswomen for the Democrats and Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee did not immediately comment.

Fifteen years ago, President George W. Bush launched the invasion of Iraq, initiating one of the longest military engagements in U.S. history. In an address to the nation, Bush declared, "America faces an enemy who has no regard for conventions of war or rules of morality." He added, "The people of the United States and our friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder."

Those weapons never materialized, of course, and the decision to go to war under false pretenses proved to be catastrophic for both the United States and Iraq. Nearly 4,500 Americans died. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, including at least 180,000 civilians, have been killed since 2003. The financial costs of the war also vastly exceeded the Bush administration's projections, totaling over $3 trillion, according to Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard professor Linda Bilmes.

Yet, in the post-9/11 era the United States sacrificed more than blood and treasure. The country severely damaged its moral standing by adopting a barbaric torture program in brazen defiance of constitutional law and international conventions. That program has been the subject of fierce debate - and often harsh criticism - over the past decade and a half. President Trump's nomination of Gina Haspel to become the next CIA director is a disquieting reminder that the United States has never truly reckoned with the disgraceful legacy of torture.

 A longtime veteran of the CIA, Haspel is the former chief of a secret detention facility, or "black site," in Thailand that played a prominent role in the Bush administration's torture program. Before Haspel's arrival in 2002, one prisoner at the facility, Zayn al-Abidin Muhammed Hussein, better known as Abu Zubaida, was waterboarded 83 times in a month, confined in a coffin-like box for hours at a time, and slammed headfirst into walls. The abuse was so inhumane that, as Dexter Filkins wrote in the New Yorker, "at one point he appeared to be dead." On Haspel's watch, another prisoner, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, was waterboarded multiple times. And in 2005, Haspel was involved in the decision to destroy videotapes of the interrogations.

Haspel faced no consequences for her role in torture or the ensuing coverup. No officials were criminally charged in the torture of at least 39 detainees who were subjected to waterboarding, mock executions, sleep deprivation, rectal feeding and other brutal techniques. In 2009, President Barack Obama issued an executive order banning torture and directing the CIA to shut down the black sites. But he declined to take further action against those who participated in the program, naively insisting that "we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards." Not only were they not held accountable, but some, including Haspel, have been rewarded.

There is much about the use of torture that the American people still don't know. The most comprehensive accounting of what happened is a 528-page summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee's torture investigation that Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), a defender of the intelligence community throughout her career, released in December 2014. The report determined that CIA officials lied to lawmakers about the program and concluded that torture "was not an effective means of obtaining accurate information . . . ." However, the CIA fought hard to suppress the report's findings, including by spying on Senate staffers' computers, and the full study, which totals more than 6,700 pages, has never seen the light of day.

There is so much that is strange on the surface of this administration* that we occasionally lose track of the incredible amount of grifting and deplorability running through the badly understaffed federal agencies, many of which are being run by people who either can't do their jobs, or who believe those jobs shouldn't really exist.

(An aside: the person at SNL who handed Betsy DeVos to Kate McKinnon on Saturday deserves whatever casting agents have for a Nobel Prize. "I do not do a good job and I can't because I do not know how" should be carved into the lintel above each door at the White House.)

The Guardian brings us a real weird one from the depths of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, nominally being run by Dr. Ben Carson, the famous neurosurgeon who apparently developed his skills practicing on himself. It seems that HUD's chief information officer, a guy with the ice-cream company name of Johnson Joy, runs a very strange religious charity in his spare time, which he seems to possess a great deal. He works there with a former HUD official who got canned for inflating his CV. Nothing but the best people, you know.

Johnson Joy, the chief information officer at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (Hud), is part of a Christian not-for-profit in Texas with Naved Jafry, who quit as a Hud adviser after inquiries about his professional history. Until this week the group, GJH Global Ministries, invited donations on its website. But it was not clear what work the group did and its mission statements and other information appeared to be copied from those of major churches. GJH was formed in 2014 but Stephen Austin, one of its directors, said in a brief interview: "We literally did nothing."

Interestingly, as soon as The Guardian dropped by to call, CJH Global Ministries locked up its website. Prior to that, you could see officials of the group doing things that no non-profit group is supposed to be doing.

Before being locked to visitors, one page of GJH's site showed a photograph of Joy addressing a crowd of people holding Trump campaign placards and wearing red "Make America great again" hats. Another showed Joy posing with Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of Texas. Not-for-profit organisations are barred under federal law from endorsing political candidates.

Both of these people come out of Joel Osteen's Lakewood mega-church, the one that initially declined to allow the victims of Hurricane Harvey to befoul its sanctuary. However, it also seems that CJH bears some resemblance to a shell corporation.

Joy founded GJH and said on an ethics disclosure to a government watchdog he was its president. He and his wife remain registered with Texas authorities as two of the group's seven directors. Until recently, the "about us" page of GJH's website featured a lengthy text identical to the corporate governance statement of the Hillsong megachurch in Australia. Adrienne Brown of Demoss, a public relations agency that represents the church, said: "Hillsong is not affiliated with GJH Ministries." A recruitment section directed visitors to a jobs portal for Gateway Church of Southlake, Texas. Lawrence Swicegood, a Gateway spokesman, said: "There is no formal business connection between Gateway Church and GJH Global Ministries."

Where did they find these people? Is there a grifter's shape-up hall somewhere? Is there a HotJobs category for the unqualified? These really are the mole people.
(c) 2018 Charles P. Pierce has been a working journalist since 1976. He is the author of four books, most recently 'Idiot America.' He lives near Boston with his wife but no longer his three children.

Democrats are already counting their electoral chickens for the midterms - but their unwillingness to lay out a clear agenda may be about to hand the party its second devastating defeat in two years.

Everyone is playing the Special Election Game.

Tea leaf readers are obsessed. But their obsession is the stuff of cocktail parties and Twitter. It won't win elections.

Does last November's Democratic win in the Virginia governor's race presage a Blue Wave or was it simply a reflection of ongoing red-to-purple demographics?

Should we be surprised that Alabama sent a Democrat (albeit a conservative one) to the Senate, they want to know?

What do we do with the fact that he very nearly lost to an alleged pedophile? And what about the latest contest in Pennsylvania - would a Democratic upset in a GOP congressional district spell the beginning of the end for Donald Trump?

Or nothing much at all?

It's all drama, no action. And if this keeps up, it's over.

Impeachment or Bust

Every midterm election is characterized as a referendum on the incumbent president. But the polarization vortex that is this unique president has raised the stakes far beyond the usual handicapping parlor game.

The rising suspicion that special counsel Robert Mueller may not be able to build enough of a Russia collusion and/or corruption case to bring down the president himself, only some of his associates, has Democrats terrified and appalled.

For those who believe that Trump represents an existential threat to democracy and its replacement by a permanent new American authoritarianism, the republic's last, only, best hope before It Does Happen Here is impeachment - but that would only be possible if and after Democrats have retaken control of Congress next year.

Only a few Democrats have implied - though not promised - that they might impeach the president if voters put them back in charge.

For Trump-hating Democrats, everything hangs upon winning back Congress and hoping their newly elected officials do the right thing. Democrats run on impeachment platform impeach trump or die democrats are counting on a favorable enthusiasm gap this November, driven in large part by liberals who despise Trump.

They pointed to another tea leaf: Texas's early primary voting, where Democratic turnout was double that of 2014. Republican turnout was lower. But then came election day. Never mind early voting; Republican voters flooded the polls when and where it mattered, on March 6th - by a three-to-two margin. Democrats lost.

Republicans remain fiercely loyal to Trump, with as many as 90% approving of the president's job performance. (Trump can only claim the support of 9% of Democrats.) The greater the likelihood of a Democratic sweep, the more GOP voters will back up Trump if for no other reason than to deny liberals the satisfaction of removing a Republican president.

"Most conservatives consume pro-Trump media, which will downplay or distort virtually anything Mueller or the mainstream press discovers," Peter Beinart wrote in The Atlantic in December.

"And the more aggressively Democrats push for Trump's removal, the easier it will be for Breitbart and Sean Hannity to rally Republicans against a 'left-wing coup.'"

The problem for those who'd like to see Trump legislatively hobbled after 2018 is that, as Musa al-Gharbi noted in The New York Times, Democrats are divided into two camps. There are establishment "Hillary voters" who reliably support any Democratic nominee, and rebellious pro-Bernie Sanders left populists who only show up to vote when the Democratic candidate is credibly progressive. Anti-Trumpism is widespread and evokes passionate responses among Democrats yet its motivational power is effectively canceled out by the party's disunity. As a result, "There does not seem to be an enthusiasm gap between Democrats and Republicans."

The solution for Democrats seems evident: Increase the enthusiasm gap by shoring up their left populist base.

Dump Trump is the Only Platform That'll Work

First, Democrats should nationalize the midterm elections the way Newt Gingrich did with his "Contract for America" in 1994.

Conservatives vote Republican because they think Democrats favor redistributionist policies like a more progressive tax system, a single-payer healthcare system and a robust minimum wage.

Progressives don't show up at general elections because Democratic politicians don't actually push for those things.

There's much to gain and little to lose by laying out an unapologetically liberal series of campaign promises focused on addressing the problems of the poor and middle class, as well as such scandalously neglected crises as the opioid epidemic, excessive military spending and out-of-control college tuition costs.

Democrats could also steal some of Trump's nationalist thunder by promising to prioritize labor and the environment in international trade agreements.

Party leaders are understandably reluctant to stamp a one-size-fits-all platform across an ideologically diverse series of contests, including many where conservative Democrats have to run in red districts.

But they can't avoid it. As they did in 2014 and 2010, Republicans will nationalize the midterms by framing their opponents as lapdogs of a radical "San Francisco liberal" - House minority leader Nancy Pelosi - and Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, a slick New Yorker. Democrats had might as well own it.

Similarly, Republicans will say that Democrats are coming to take away their guns, their freedoms and their president - so they must defend him.

Who cares if Pelosi says impeachment is "not someplace that I think we should go" if Democrats take back the majority? No one who listens to Rush Limbaugh will ever hear her.

Since they won't lose any swing voters by doing so, but they would generate enthusiasm among their currently weak progressive left flank, Democrats had might as well own impeachment too.

"I would bring back waterboarding, and I'd bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding." ~~~ Donald Trump, 02/16/2016

Fifteen years ago this week, George W. Bush and his pack of unprosecuted murderers transformed the city of Baghdad into a bowl of fire, "Shock & Awe," in what was a massive war crime right there on live television. I call it a war crime justly: It was an act based entirely on lies founded in greed and lust for power, for which not one person has been called to account.

Millions of human beings have been butchered, maimed, displaced and undone in those 15 years since the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq. The war there has actually been going on in one form or another for 27 years now. Yet no one is held accountable even as we slog, year after year, through the drifting ashes of aftermath.

We simply don't talk about it.

We are allowed, within the narrow confines of permissible debate, to rub our collective woes together and wonder how so much could go so wrong so fast. The physical shock of September 11 doesn't explain it, but the manner in which that day was used against us certainly fills in the blank spaces. They used it to start a war that has now become several wars, and a few people you'll never meet continue to swim in the profits.

More than a trillion dollars have been spent so far on the wars, and that's just the coin on the books, not to mention the trillion or more to be spent as the veterans of that war seek VA care for the damage they will bear all their lives. They are still young, most of those who have survived their multiple tours in the forever wars. They will be with us for a half-century at least, and they deserve every dime we spend on their care. All in all, we will spend plenty on this butcher's bill.

We don't talk about the war and what it has stolen from us, because the politicians and news organizations still live in dread of a reckoning that seems, in the orange light of the now, so terribly and enduringly out of reach. I used to imagine George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld and the rest of them standing before the bar in The Hague. Fifteen years later, I can't imagine a more farfetched possibility. Neptune is closer.

The war in Iraq was and remains a debasing, despicable act the United States may never recover from. It is a moral catastrophe in every respect, one that still wounds us deeply to this day. No aspect of our shame is more vivid than the stain of torture. Some have tried to scrub that stain out of us -- President Obama famously whitewashed the horror of it all by admitting "We tortured some folks," before calling the critics "sanctimonious" and the torturers "patriots" -- but it's still there, like Lady MacBeth's damned spot.

Now, as we approach the 15th anniversary of Bush's Iraq invasion, two notorious torturers are poised to assume positions of enormous power within the federal government. CIA Director Mike Pompeo has been tapped to replace ignominious failure Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State, and agency veteran Gina Haspel is set to replace Pompeo as head of the CIA.

Pompeo was quick to denounce the practice during his CIA confirmation hearings, but his political path to power is littered with the broken bodies of torture victims. He did not lay hands on them himself, but was a vocal supporter of the "black sites" where torture took place, and he has championed an Islamophobia so profound that he once blamed all Muslim leaders everywhere for the Boston Marathon bombing. Pompeo's ardent support for torture is what first caught Donald Trump's attention, as the president is also an ardent believer in "enhanced interrogation."

Gina Haspel is another matter entirely. She was not just another pro-war shouter back in DC. Haspel was in it up to her throat. For a time, she ran one of the "black sites," this one located in Thailand, and was so proud of her work that she destroyed the tapes of her interrogations. For this, she was neither fired nor prosecuted, and pending confirmation will be in charge of one of the largest intelligence organizations in the world.

These are some of the many issues only a thorough investigation can answer, but with torture advocates and practitioners about to control the White House, the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency, such an investigation is almost certainly never going to happen. "Gina Haspel does not belong as head of the CIA," journalist Jeremy Scahill told Democracy Now! "She belongs in front of a judge, answering to what she was doing, running a torture operation at a black site in Thailand and destroying evidence."

When the TV news people were covering Tillerson's sudden departure and Pompeo's subsequent elevation, the subject of torture actually elbowed its way into the discussion. Suddenly, we were talking about one of the things we never talk about ... and it was as vile as every other seedy, shabby element of this ongoing disgrace.

The lengths those talking heads went to try and butter over Pompeo and Haspel's bloody history was positively aerobic. There hasn't been that much televised stammering since the Porky Pig marathon on the Cartoon Network. The sum and substance of their collective conclusion was, "Well, Steve, it ... seems to me ... that if we ... took away ... everyone in CIA who ... participated ... in ... torture ... well ... there wouldn't ... be anyone left ... to run the place."

Dear Stellvertretender Direktor Haspel,

Congratulations, you have just been awarded the "Vidkun Quisling Award!" Your name will now live throughout history with such past award winners as Marcus Junius Brutus, Judas Iscariot, Benedict Arnold, George Stephanopoulos, George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, Prescott Bush, Sam Bush, Fredo Bush, Kate Bush, Kyle Busch, Anheuser Busch, Vidkun Quisling, and last year's winner Volksjudge John (the enforcer) Roberts.

Without your lock step calling for the repeal of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, your ability and desire to torture our enemies and then cover it up, Yemen, Syria, Iran and those many other profitable oil wars to come would have been impossible! With the help of our mutual friends, the other "Rethuglican Whores" you have made it possible for all of us to goose-step off to a brave new bank account!

Along with this award you will be given the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Golden Oak Leaves, Swords and Diamonds presented by our glorious Fuhrer, Herr Trump at a gala celebration at "der Fuhrer Bunker," formally the "White House," on 04-28-2018. We salute you Frau Haspel Sieg Heil!

Signed by,
Vice Fuhrer Pence