Everyone knows I don’t love the Times, but I read it to know what those who run this country are saying, and sometimes I find enlightening info and opinions. See:
1. Friday’s interview with Daniel Ellsberg, The Man Who Leaked the Pentagon Papers is Scared, who is also featured in the film The Movement and the Madman, above. He continues to show great courage in exposing the crimes of the government, even as he has announced he has only months to live due to pancreatic cancer. The interviewer asked, “Why haven’t we seen nuclear weapons used since 1945?” Dan’s answer:
We have seen nuclear weapons used many times. And they’re being used right now by both sides in Ukraine. They’re being used as threats, just as a bank robber uses a gun, even if he doesn’t pull the trigger. You’re lucky if you can get your way in some part without pulling the trigger. And we’ve done that dozens of times. But eventually, as any gambler knows, your luck runs out.
For 70 years, the U.S. has frequently made the kind of wrongful first-use threats of nuclear weapons that Putin is making now in Ukraine. We should never have done that, nor should Putin be doing it now. I’m worried that his monstrous threat of nuclear war to retain Russian control of Crimea is not a bluff. President Biden campaigned in 2020 on a promise to declare a policy of no first use of nuclear weapons. He should keep that promise, and the world should demand the same commitment from Putin.”
2. Jamelle Bouie’s column, Don’t Be Fooled: Ron DeSantis Is a Bush-Cheney Republican. More of the history of DeSantis as a promoter of Bush and Cheney’s enhanced interrogation and torture methods is coming out. Bouie poses that rather than portraying DeSantis as like Trump (let’s lock more up in GTMO), he’s a product of the Bush/Cheney regime which established Guantanamo and oversaw widespread torture there and in the secret “black” sites. There’s a point here.
As a lawyer at Guantánamo Bay, according to a report by Michael Kranish in The Washington Post, DeSantis endorsed the force-feeding of detainees.
“Detainees were strapped into a chair, and a lubricated tube was stuffed down their nose so a nurse could pour down two cans of a protein drink,” Kranish wrote. “The detainees’ lawyers tried and failed to stop the painful practice, arguing that it violated international torture conventions.”