Pondering the Pundits

Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from> around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

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Sonya Sceats: Gina Haspel’s CIA appointment will delight torturers around the globe

Donald Trump’s nominee to become the next director of the CIA has ignited great moral anguish in the US, but from Bangkok to London and beyond we should all be alarmed.

Gina Haspel, who has worked at the CIA since the 1980s, stands accused of running a notorious CIA facility in Thailand where a Saudi terrorist suspect, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, was subjected to waterboarding and other forms of “enhanced interrogation techniques” – which our experts at Freedom from Torture would have no trouble recognising as torture. She then reportedly ordered the destruction of videotapes of these torture sessions, which smacks of a cover-up.

At the very least, there are serious questions for Haspel to answer in a court of law. The Berlin-based European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights has called on German prosecutors to issue an arrest warrant for her under universal jurisdiction laws against torture, and the international criminal court is also considering evidence against her. But the chances of her facing international justice are slim. Instead, Haspel stands to be granted command of the entire CIA, the most powerful intelligence agency in the world.

This lamentable state of affairs could have been avoided had Barack Obama complied with the United States’ obligations under the UN convention against torture to investigate and prosecute those responsible for the CIA’s torture programme. He refused to do so, as part of a misguided theory that the best way to stop future torture by the CIA was to “look forward as opposed to looking backwards”.

Jill Abramsom: Comey’s wish for a leaker’s ‘head on a pike’? Proof he’s no better than Trump

With Donald Trump, there is sometimes so much material to provoke outrage that you worry something important is bound to be overlooked. This is the case with the recently released Comey memos, which detail his shocking conversations with the new president. [..]

In a memo dated 14 February 2017, Comey says Trump complained during an Oval Office meeting about classified information being leaked to the media. Comey writes that he said he “agreed very much” that it was “terrible” such information was being leaked, and added that he was “eager to find leakers and would like to nail one to the door as a message”. Comey adds that Trump “wrapped up” the conversation “by returning to the issue of finding leakers”.

“I said something about the value of putting a head on a pike as a message,” Comey writes. “[Trump] replied by saying it may involve putting reporters in jail. ‘They spend a couple days in jail, make a new friend, and they are ready to talk.’”

Then, as a grand finale, Comey “laughed as I walked to the door Reince Priebus had opened”. [..]

Comey’s callous remark about putting a head on a pike shows him for the man he is. Trump’s comment about jailed reporters finding a “new friend” in prison is vile and beneath contempt.

Charles M. Blow: America Abhors Impeachment

Folks, have a seat and get some tea. I have something to tell you that you may not want to hear: Everyone still hoping for Donald Trump’s removal from office is hoping against the odds.

Yes, Trump is wholly unqualified, lacking in morality and character, a consummate liar and surrounded by corruption. Yes, every day that he occupies the presidency he is a threat to this country, its ideas, conventions and comity, but also arguably to the safety and security of the world itself.

But, although a perspicuous case can be made for his removal, that is an uphill battle because enough of the public and the political class abhor impeachment and find removal to be extreme and indecorous, even for a compromised president.

It is possible that Trump could be impeached if the Democrats take the House of Representatives (odds are that they will) but a conviction in the Senate (where odds are the Republicans will retain a majority, however slim) is all but impossible.

Will Bunch: Mitch McConnell Gets his Own Chapter in the Story of America’s Dying Democracy. And it’s Devastating

It’s kind of trivial, perhaps, but one of my favorite odd facts about the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom — the epic event that produced Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech — is that not one but two college kids in the bobbing sea of faces crammed around the Reflecting Pool listening to King’s immortal words would grow up to become U.S. senators many years later.

One future senator would — over the course of his 50-year-long, 1000-1-shot rise to political prominence — remain remarkable true to the expansive vision of that 1963 march, with an almost annoyingly loud but consistent, laser-like focus on expanding economic opportunity and fighting for the working classes.

The other young man in the shadows of MLK grew up to become Mitch McConnell.

Unlike the young Bernie Sanders, McConnell must have been taking a dip in the Reflecting Pool or even dozing off when King said that “with this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.” To the contrary, the Kentucky Republican has risen to the pinnacle of U.S. power, as Senate majority leader, by turning up those “jangling discords” to a nearly deafening level — with no moral or ideological compass other than following the Big Money that promises political power in our warped 21st century, with a win-at-all costs mentality that crushes norms of basic democracy that had survived for a couple of centuries. It is Mitch McConnell, more than anyone else in Washington, who has turned the notion of comity into comedy.

Leonard Pitts, Jr.: Starbucks isn’t the problem, America is

I don’t drink coffee, so I can’t boycott Starbucks. But I wouldn’t if I could.

Yes, I understand — and share — the national anger over viral video of last week’s arrest of two African-American men at one of the company’s Philadelphia stores. The men, who have yet to be identified, were reportedly doing nothing more threatening than waiting quietly to be joined by a man they were meeting there, having asked to use the restroom and been refused. Their waiting apparently scared the bejeezus out of the manager, who called police.

Cellphone video of the incident shows a white guy asking if the men are being arrested because “they were black guys, sitting there.”

An officer, attempting facetiousness, says yes.

But his facetiousness is misplaced because obviously, that’s exactly why they were arrested. On the video the white customers are upset, but the men accept it placidly, as befits veterans of the exhausting job of Being While Black.

Now Starbucks faces a public-relations nightmare as people swear off its lattes and macchiatos. Protesters have appeared at the Philadelphia store. “Starbucks Coffee is Anti-Black” they chanted. “Shame on Starbucks,” one sign declared.

But Starbucks isn’t the point.

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/opinion/article209183114.html#storylink=cpy