Presidential Candidates on Torture and Slaughter and Cynthia McKinney on the State of the Union

We speak with Rebecca Gordon about "American War Crimes, Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow" and what happens when a nation commits war crimes, and they are never prosecuted.  In her article on TomDispatch Gordon shows how post-9/11, Washington could have sported the logo: War Crimes "R" Us, but such acts were never truly faced, and no one was held accountable in a court of law.  So the field, it seems, is open to do it all over again, and a number of the Republican candidates are jumping into the war crimes sweepstakes.  Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and others are promising, if they enter the Oval Office, to commit a whole range of them, from torture to the slaughter of civilians, for which the leaders of some nations would find themselves hauled into international court as war criminals. But “war criminal” is a label reserved purely for people we loathe, not for us.  

Gordon explores our recent past in the war crimes business and how an unwillingness to confront what was done and make people accountable for those acts has left the field open for Donald Trump and crew to promise a veritable menu of future war crimes.  

Rebecca Gordon is the author of Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches in the Post-9/11 United States. She teaches in the philosophy department at the University of San Francisco. She is a member of the War Times/Tiempo de Guerras collective. She also lived in Portland for ten years.

http://http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176087/i

At 9:30 we hear an episode of  Talk Nation Radio featuring "Cynthia McKinney's Real State of the Union." Host David Swanson speaks with Cynthia McKinney, who served in the Georgia State Legislature and the United States Congress, where she voted against NAFTA, opposed the war on Iraq, and introduced the first resolution for the impeachment of George W. Bush.