Thursday, July 7, 2016

They didn't read them the rights. In fact they didn't even have any.



One of the things that's passed a lot of people by with the Trump's scandalous praise for the dictator Saddam Hussein—
"He was a bad guy -- really bad guy. But you know what? He did well? He killed terrorists. He did that so good. They didn't read them the rights. They didn't talk. They were terrorists. Over. Today, Iraq is Harvard for terrorism," Trump said.
—is that he's actually been doing it for quite a while, in pretty much the same language, as in the Tweet above referencing an event in South Carolina in February, and back as early as 2004, in a tally presented by Margaret Hartmann at New York Magazine. "Iraq is Harvard for terrorism." It started off as a tough-guy way of objecting to the 2003 invasion: it wasn't wrong because it killed a lot of people for no good reason, but because it was good for terrorists, who also kill a lot of people for no good reason, but when they do it it's worse than when we do it, because they're terrorists QED. I hope that's clear.

Like many of us, I agree in a very general way that had the Bush administration not invaded Iraq it would have been a good thing all around, but especially for people in Iraq, Syria, and the old neighborhood, but I cannot agree that Saddam Hussein had the right approach to dealing with terrorists, especially the not reading them the rights or talking part.

That approach led to the killing of somewhere between 250,000 and 500,000 Iraqis who were probably not terrorists but who were caught in such suspicious activities as receiving money from relatives working abroad, or being Kurdish. Hussein's approach to terrorism was to assume that everybody who showed signs of disagreeing with him was a terrorist who needed to be tortured and their families killed. I don't know why Trump says Hussein was a "bad guy", given how much they have in common.

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