As we’re remembering the Iraq War, coupled with that is the so-called “Global War on Terror,” beginning as the fallaciously/duplicitously named "Operation Enduring Freedom,” in Afghanistan. From whose operational funding I was paid for my assignmment as a Guantanamo defense attorney from 2008, to the end of 2012. While continuing that yet today on an appellate case begun in 2009, with a hearing set in DC for Wednesday. So my assignment as defense counsel didn’t overlap with DeSantis’s work there for the “anti-Constitutional/pro-torture” side, the USG, that he was on. But I learned immediately, on the first day of my arrival in the Office of the Chief Defense Counsel, what DeSantis had been part of. That is, as part of the “Banality of Evil” of the USG, as reported in the attached articles; an “evil” which he’s zealously defended. I accompanied an officer representing Mohamed Jawad to interview a former Commander of Guantanamo. In sitting in on that interview, I learned of the various tortures that Jawad, a juvenile when first tortured, had been subjected to. Which I know from further research, was worse than those who in the American mind, were the worst when it came to torture, the Stasi, and KGB.
Thank the CIA for that, and their torture supporting Congressional defenders, the Republican Party. With only a few Democrats thrown in on that, particularly the Republican acting, and affiliate, and 1/3 of the “Three Amigos,” Joe Lieberman.
But here is presumed POTUS candidate, Ron DeSantis, presumably vying to be “Torturer in Chief,” as Trump had promised he would be (and I presume was). That Biden hasn’t undone these policies speak to the fact of how much as a Scoop Jackson Democrat, he fully imbibed
"J. WILLIAM MIDDENDORF: The convention pretty much killed us. I mean, I had a sinking feeling that it was pretty much over. It was mitigated by the roar of the crowds, but that’s very misleading. We lost by 15 million votes in the actual election. But I’d say because of Goldwater’s breaking the ice, so to speak, the conservative movement became very important within the Republican party. After Goldwater, we went on to Reagan.”
And ih same time frame, some Democrats, like Joe Biden, would line up with the equally extremist, and friend/collaborator of Goldwater’s, Scoop Jackson, in forming a Democratic Party faction fully aligned with Goldwater’s ideology. And facially apparent, Biden as a junior member of the Goldwater led SSCI, would fully imbibe Goldwater’s “National Security State Ideology,” with that ideology eventually becoming a necessity to adhere to for any high level judicial appointments, as has been written of elsewhere.
"He has repeatedly argued that the United States was correct in imprisoning detainees outside the legal system, and after joining Congress in 2013, he became a leading voice to keep the prison open, even though few of the detainees there were ever charged and most have been released. He has described the hunger strikes as part of a “jihad” against the United States, and characterized claims of abuse from detainees and their lawyers as attempts to work the system — foreshadowing his conservative views as a lawmaker on issues ranging from constitutional rights to military and criminal justice.
"Asked about the hunger strikes, DeSantis said in the local CBS interviewin 2018 that “what I learned from that … is they are using things like detainee abuse offensively against us. It was a tactic, technique and procedure.”
“I fear that going in the other direction where you somehow need to give them a quasi-civilian trial with basic constitutional rights almost, at the end of the day in the normal battle you are not going to be able to do that without really diverting the mission,” DeSantis said at the hearing.“And I don’t want to be doing that.”
Stop
A “true-believer” in fascist-like "legal theory” if there ever was one, helping to explain National Conservative Schmittian/Straussian Peter Thiel’s support of the Carl Schmitt like thinker, Ron DeSantis. So beloved by some here!
Iraqis Tortured by the U.S. in Abu Ghraib Never Got JusticeAnd here are an updated couple of pieces on the DeSantis/Guantanamo connection: