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CaptHaddock
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Posts posted by CaptHaddock
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26 minutes ago, mrwebb8825 said:
Just to put an end to this discussion, General John Hyten has no say so anyway.
"POTUS has a card, commonly called the "biscuit," with the nuclear launch codes on it. He also has a briefcase, nicknamed the "football," carried by a military aide who is never more than about 15 seconds away from the President, with the equipment and the information needed to launch a nuclear strike. The National Command Authority (NCA), POTUS with the consideration of the SecDef who must agree, can do the first step."
He is not part of the NCA.
"Only the President can direct the use of nuclear weapons by U.S. armed forces, including the Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP). While the President does have unilateral authority as commander-in-chief to order that nuclear weapons be used for any reason at any time, the actual procedures and technical systems in place for authorizing the execution of a launch order requires a secondary confirmation under a two-man rule, as the President's order is subject to secondary confirmation by the Secretary of Defense. If the Secretary of Defense does not concur, then the President may in his sole discretion fire the Secretary. The Secretary of Defense has legal authority to approve the order, but cannot veto it."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Command_Authority
Then NORAD - Then the ships and submarines commands.
It was believed in the past that sub commanders must have had authority to launch nuclear missiles since radio communication with submerged subs was either unreliable or impossible, depending on who you spoke to.
Whether current radio technology permits underwater communication is an interesting question.
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15 minutes ago, Srikcir said:
That is really the one of the distinguishing factors between Trump and other presidents in a war crisis. For example, would we see the same conversation with Obama and generals? I don't think so.
The American people trusted both Truman and Lincoln to make decisions that are best for the nation - the American people as a whole. Trump shows his decisions are made only for his own ego and a minority that feeds that ego. American generals have cause to distrust Trump's competency as a commander-in-chief and the influence of nationalists (aka fascists) on his policies.
We don't know what the generals think of Trump, because they don't say. We can be sure that they were very pleased at the $54 billion increase in the military budget proposed by Trump. My guess is that money matters to them more than Trump's manners.
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4 minutes ago, Srikcir said:
The initial story reported by CNN said the general would "push back" on the order, ie., present talking points to the President of why the order should not be given. Generals should provide advise and options to the President. The President's job is to listen then decide - not the generals.
"Push back" is defined as "resistance" or opposition in response to a policy or regulation especially by those affected. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pushback
Both are not defined as "refusal" which seems how the news media is now presenting the general's comments. I'm sure the General was aware of such nuances so as not to be heard that he would disobey a Presidential order.
As a matter of conjunctive historical interest, it was a general that drafted President Truman's order to bomb Japan with nuclear weapons. The order made no mention of targeting military objectives or sparing civilians. The cities themselves were the targets. There was no limit as to the number of nuclear bombs to be used.
http://www.dannen.com/decision/handy.html
In fact, no order to drop the Hiroshima bomb was ever issued by Truman. The order referenced was signed by a general. Of course, Truman was aware of the plan to drop the bomb, but the military was in control of the entire process and never asked Truman for an order. There is good evidence that Truman was not even informed of the Nagasaki bomb in advance, was surprised by it, and immediately ordered a halt to any further atomic bombing, which was closing the barn doors after the horses had fled since the military had by then expended 100% of its nuclear inventory.
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2 hours ago, bendejo said:
DT's innovation is called gaslighting, not a new term. Not necessarily done on a contentious level: e.g. during one of the debates with HRC he kept sniffling. When asked about it he said there was "no sniffling." While not an earth-shaking matter, that kind of lie shows a true contempt for the person you're speaking to. And then comes the other stuff like "I never mocked a handicapped person," "I never said _______" when these things are easily refuted by video recordings.
I never watched any of his TV shows, the first I caught of him speaking was a clip in an airplane hangar during the Obama years. He had been saying he has investigators in Hawaii checking Obama's past, and they were coming up with some "amazing stuff." In the hangar appearance a reporter asked about this, he dodged the question, and when another reporter asked the same thing he said "I already answered that." Talk about brass!
Gaslighting is a little different. It's a kind of manipulation or deception that is intended to get you to doubt your own perception. The term comes from the movie, "Gaslight," in which secret Nazi Claude Rains is trying to drive his wife, Ingrid Bergman, mad, by such tricks as pretending to continue to read when the lights have gone out to cause poor Ingrid to think she must be losing her mind.
I don't read DT's lies as intended to get Americans to doubt their own perceptions as though they might become unsure as to whether Obama's inauguration crowd is really larger than Trump's even though the pictures clearly show it was.
Trump's bald, demonstrably false lies are intended to show that he is more powerful than the truth. This is the kind of lie that is the hallmark of third-world dictators. Power is the only thing that matters. Just like Putin.
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2 minutes ago, Thaidream said:
You can't make an illegal order- legal simply because another person says it's legal. General Officers who have to carry out orders know full well what is a legal order versus what is not legal. They constantly go over a multitude of scenarios; have access to a wide variety on intelligence assessments (from a variety of Governments) and collaborate on how to respond. I just cannot imagine a nuclear first strike ordered by Trump and opposed by the National Command that would be carried out anyway even if ordered by Trump . They would simply tell him the order is illegal and refuse to follow it.
I would also imagine that at that point- the 25th Amendment would come into play and the 'group' would take a vote to remove the President and the Vice President if necessary. That would make the Speaker of the House-President.
Apparently you find that fantasy comforting. Let me remind you: it. has. never. happened.
You don't understand the 25th Amendment. Read it before attempting to discuss it.
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4 minutes ago, Thaidream said:
There is a big difference from refusing to initiate a nuclear war and the invasion of a country for a reason related to national security. While I firmly believe the Iraq War was a huge mistake and the expansion of the Afghan war a useless exercise- there was ample leadup to the invasions and ample evidence presented (some not credible in the long run) that America had a right to protect its national interest. In addition, both of these invasions came after 9-11 which has traumatized the American public like no incident except Pearl Harbor. We can also condemn the Soviet invasion of Hungary and Czechoslovakia and the Russian invasion of the Crimea but the Russians saw this in their national interests.
I seriously doubt that there would be many publicised incidents of American officers refusing to obey an order they consider illegal. However, that doesn't mean it has never happened. As I mentioned, the Vietnam War produced convictions of Officers who did follow an order which was deemed illegal and opened the whole subject up to debate. High ranking officers are provided extensive training and education on the rules of War; the International law; and the United Nations.
IMHO- starting a nuclear war in which millions die and an escalation that threatens World stability is a much graver situation than a conventional attack. With a conventional attack- forces can be withdrawn. Once the bomb explodes- there is no turning back. I cannot think of a scenario in which a nuclear first strike would be warranted and if Trump ordered it- I doubt the General(s) would comply as the order would be illegal. I hope we never get to that point nor do I envision even a conventional first strike by the US, except under the most extreme circumstance.
You're dreaming. People do what they are trained to do and no one knows that better than the military. Soldiers are trained to obey, not to think critically and certainly not to disobey an order. If they all received training about how to recognize an illegal order and how to refuse to carry it out and if their war games exercises included issuing illegal orders and penalizes the soldiers for obeying them uncritically, then you might have some expectation that soldiers might refuse to carry out such an order. But we know that the US military does no such training. The general who refused Trump's order to launch a nuclear attack would be disobeying an order for the first time in his life. There is no way such an untested system could be regarded as reliable.
When Ronald Reagan was shot, the Secretary of State Al Haig addressed the nation on TV and couldn't even get the order of succession straight and illegally put himself in command. Haig had been an AF general.
If Trump were to give the order, no one knows what would happen. The generals might launch the missiles or they might launch a coup. Up to them.
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Amazing to me that people believe what this general says just because he says so. I find it telling that he apparently cited no examples of senior military leadership refusing an illegal order from the president or from anyone else? The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were the making if illegal, aggressive war which is against the charter of the UN to which the US is a signatory. The invasions of Panama and Grenada were illegal. The treatment of prisoners of war at the Abu Ghraib prison was illegal. When did we ever hear about a soldier disobeying an unlawful order? This guy is ridiculous.
What is the highest decoration a soldier can receive for courageously disobeying an illegal order? Oh, there isn't any.
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5 hours ago, Opl said:
Why Trump lies
Lies are the way authoritarians exercise power. While in office, Trump has lied 1,628 times
"Trump tells lies as a way to exercise power. He used lies to accumulate wealth as a businessman. He used lies to accumulate votes as a candidate. He used lies to accumulate power as a president. Now he’s using lies to keep himself from being removed from office. "
All true, but this piece misses the big Trump innovation in lying. A lot of politicians lie of course, but they tell ordinary lies, the purpose of which is merely to deceive. Trump tells plenty of ordinary lies, but he also tells a kind of lie new in American politics, the lie that is too obvious to be believed. So, when he claims that he won the popular vote or that attendance at his innauguration exceeded Obama's even when the side-by-side photos show the opposite, he knows that no one will believe him. So, why tell a lie if no one believes it? Because to Trump the truth does matter in the least. He shows that he is more powerful than the truth, that even when his lie is exposed as a lie he just keeps on telling it and no one can make him stop. You don't have to be powerful to tell the truth, but it takes a powerful man to keep on lying when everyone knows it's a lie.
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14 hours ago, EvenSteven said:
Mueller has uncovered material that links the Trump crime syndicate to laundering dirty Russian money through their property holdings in Panama. Mauricio Ceballos, a former prosecutor in Panama who investigated Trump’s business associates for financial crimes, called the Trump Ocean Club “a vehicle for money laundering.”
What's particularly entertaining about the corrupt activities of the Trump crime family in Panama is that it bled over to Mar-a-Lago which served as a money-laundering facility for the Russian kleptocracy. And the sweet spot there is that Mar-a-Lago has been run by Ivanka Trump, whom I look forward to seeing in prison orange along with her career criminal husband.
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2 hours ago, Srikcir said:
That's correct because he can't. Impeachment is a political process performed by Congress to remove elected officials from office, even the POTUS.
Mueller is engaged to discern civil criminal federal violations such as obstruction of justice, witness tampering, conspiracy to defraud the US government, bribery, money laundering, income evasion, lying under oath (including written responses), etc. Such violations or convictions may also be used by Congress to justify an impeachment process. Mueller is also working with state attorney generals who separately may bring criminal charges against Trump and/or his "associates." Defendants in state charges cannot be pardoned by US Presidential Order.
Only the House of Representatives can vote articles of impeachment, not a special prosecutor. However, if Mueller finds evidence of crimes by Trump that appear to meet the criteria for impeachment in the Constitution, then he can send his report to the House recommending impeachment. There is a difference of opinion as to whether a sitting president can be criminally indicted. In the Watergate time, Leon Jaworski, the special prosecutor, did not indict Nixon, but named him as an "unindicted conspirator." While it's true that impeachment by the House and trial by the Senate is fundamentally a political process, not a judicial one, article of impeachment will necessarily accuse the President of crimes according to the Constitution, which are not necessarily statutory crimes. So, the process is not purely a political one.
Mueller, like any prosecutor, is only concerned with criminal prosecution and cannot bring a civil suit.
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1 hour ago, Srikcir said:
Appreciate your speculation but hopefully it won't be tested. But I can't deny the possibility no matter how remote that some American military officers might commit treason in the face of denying a civilian command. With regard to what the Russians say about alleged US secret conversations, every action the Russian government takes is self-promoting and take down of American icons would serve its purposes.
Just to add a note: an unwise decision made by the POTUS is not necessarily the same as an illegal decision, ie., in violation to the Constitution and existing laws. There is otherwise nothing in the Constitution that prevents the POTUS from commanding the armed forces to pursue a political strategy.
The reason that I find it plausible that Kennedy had rational fears of a military coup at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis is not because of Dobrynin's statement, but because we know from the tapes of the deliberations of JFK's Executive Group that all the Joint Chiefs, Cabinet members, and Johnson were in favor of a US invasion of Cuba and were actually preparing for it. Curtis LeMay's Strategic Air Command deliberately overflew their checkpoints around the Soviet Union at the time. The CIA sent in sabotage teams during the Crisis against the orders of Kennedy. And during the confrontation between the US Navy ships turning back Soviet ships on the high seas Kennedy insisted on being patched directly into the fleet commander over the objections of Navy brass. So, Kennedy was certainly acting like a man who didn't trust his own military. Dobrynin's account merely shows RFK expressing the Kennedys' fears of the military in a believable way.
After the Crisis subsided the Joint Chiefs were furious with Kennedy for not invading claiming to Kennedy's face that it was the biggest defeat in US history. And the next year Kennedy was murdered by a plot with government involvement.
As for what happens if Trump decides to push the button, all bets are off. No one knows. The fact that there are procedures means nothing.
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8 minutes ago, Slip said:
Sessions is a full on swamp dweller. My hope now is for him to be the very first to fall to the forces of truth and justice, and then the first to find a new lover on the inside. Trump and co can wait for a few months as long as he is no longer POTUS.
It's clear that the Atty General has perjured himself repeatedly and always with a smile on his face. And yet, he did recuse himself on the Russia investigation and he is pushing back on the Repub calls to sic a special prosecutor on HC.
If Trump were to replace him, do you think either AG Rudi Giuliani or AG Chris Christie would have even that much in the way of scruples?
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5 hours ago, Srikcir said:
If the President orders a first strike, there is no principle of proportionality. Proportionality is a strategic response. A First Strike is a political decision and the military has no political authority. That belongs to the POTUS.
An ex-General can voice whatever opinion he wants. Let's hear from an active duty general - Gen. McMaster?
Unless the generals stage a coup in which case they then have all authority. Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador to Washington during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, wrote in his memoirs that Robert Kennedy met with him secretly at the time and told him that President Kennedy did not want to start a war with Cuba, but that he might not be able to control the US military who could stage a coup and then invade Cuba.
So, it can happen here. Indeed, there is a basis for believing that the assassination in 1963 was a coup d'etat.
My guess is that if Trump were to order a nuclear attack, all bets would be off. There is no way to predict what the military would actually do. They probably don't know themselves, despite all their reams of procedure.
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Trump has never once called for measures to protect American elections from foreign tampering. His response has been only to deny, deny, deny. Meanwhile he savages the US spy agencies, the generals, the Congress, Republicans, Democrats, everyone except Putin. Sometimes things are what they obviously appear to be. Trump has been bought and/or compromised somehow by the Russians, just as the Steele Dossier claimed.
It will all come out as Flynn, Manafort, Papadopoulos, and the others flip and sing.
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You see, it's really not hard. You just ignore.
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11 minutes ago, craigt3365 said:
It might have kept Hillary out of the WH, but allowed another massively corrupt and inept person to be there in her place. A person who's lies out pace every other president before him.
Sad post to suggest a win if Trump accomplishes nothing in the next 3 years. Incredible.
See what I mean? What is the point of arguing with someone who chose Trump because of corruption? There. Is. No. Point.
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Seems like Shingrix is worth the money:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/10/health/shingrix-shingles-vaccine.html
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This thread has value to me to get updated on and discuss the latest developments in the Mueller investigation and other administration scandals. It completely baffles me why people persist in attempting to have a dialog with dimwits who are demonstrably beyond the reach of rational discourse. It's like believing that today you will be the one to get a member of the Flat Earth Society finally to see the error of his ways. Is this really worth your time?
Somehow there will have to be a way to defeat Trumpism in America other than depending on these people to smarten up. Like getting out the Dem vote, for instance.
Give it up.
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15 minutes ago, dundas said:
If you want to hear a dispassionate account from people on both sides of politics, there's a recent series of interviews that the Economist magazine have conducted on their radio program -- 9 November, to be exact. Their take on his Russian escapades, for instance: Trump knows Russia as a good place to have Miss World contests, and a terrible place if you want to build a hotel there -- he's been trying for decades. That's about all he wants to know about Russia. Almost certainly his generals are telling him stories about Russia's military capability and the threat that Russia represents, but he's not interested. And his desire to build a hotel there is a possible reason he tends to take Putin at face value, greed over crap detecting any day ....
Although it's true that Trump has wanted to open a hotel in Moscow for years, the actual role he has been fulfilling since about 2000 has been to launder the money of a variety of Russian kleptocrats into his businesses especially using Bayrock a Russian front for ill-gotten gains. This documentary lays out some of the relationships involved:
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How could Alabama voters be so benighted as to swarm to a degenerate like Moore? Let's consult my favorite map that compares US states with foreign countries that have comparable high school graduation rates as one measure of educational success. How does Alabama compare?
Uh-oh.
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Moore won't drop out and the national Repub leadership cannot force him to. Moore will run and he will win, unfortunately. Alabama voters know Moore for years and they love him. However, the Senate can at any time expel him with a two thirds majority. Or the Republicans can refuse to admit him to their caucus. However, in the end neither of those things will happen because McConnell needs the votes.
A write-in campaign for Strange to split the Repub vote and hand the election to the Democrat is a long shot. Repubs would rather have a child molester than a Dem.
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Politico has a good piece on Trump supporters in a small rust-belt town in PA. Right after the election they were enthusiastic for Trump, but warned that they wouldn't tolerate it if he failed to revive the coal and steel industries. Now they know he will never deliver on any of his promises, but they don't care they love him any way. Reason seems to be that Trump hates the same people they hate and that's enough.
In short, the deplorables are incorrigible. But then we knew that already.
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1 hour ago, Jingthing said:
Not a long shot to flip the house.
But yes for the senate.
There would have to be a smoking gun type thing to convict in the senate.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-fundamentals-favor-democrats-in-2018/
But we haven't forgotten that we can't count our chickens, have we?
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Tuesday's election results strengthen the case NOT to impeach Trump. The electoral gains in VA, WA, CT, and NJ are due to a greater turnout for Dems, which is significant, because weak turnout in off-year elections has helped the Repubs a lot in the past. Trump is a great motivator for Democrat voters. We need him. If the presidency were turned over to right-wing theocrat Pence, the media would be tempted to sound the all-clear signal.
The best outcome is a lame-duck Trump facing a Dem Congress and paralyzed by the prosecution and incarceration of members of his organization and family.
I think Dem control of both houses of Congress is still a long-shot, but not impossible. A majority of Americans now believe that Trump commit a crime with the Russians. The flow of revelations over the next year or two will only strengthen that view.
U.S. nuclear general says would resist 'illegal' Trump strike order
in World News
Posted
Years ago I read an article about radio communications with subs that said that ELF communications require a very long antenna, at the time 1.5 miles of copper, towed behind the sub. Just now I see Wikipedia reports that a sub can receive ELF, but cannot house its own transmitter, so that communication is incoming only. Sounds problematical to me. I wonder if the sub commanders still have nuke launch authority.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_with_submarines#Extremely_low_frequency