The President of the United States Explicitly Endorses Torture — a Crime Against Humanity

Even George W. Bush called torture abhorrent.
“Freedom from torture is an inalienable human right, and we are committed to building a world where human rights are respected and protected by the rule of law,” he wrote on the UN International Day in Support of Victims of Torture in 2004.
Bush’s words were outrageously insincere and hypocritical, considering that his administration brutally tortured hundreds of captives in the war on terror, referring to it euphemistically as “enhanced interrogation.”
But in his first week as president, Donald Trump won’t stop telling the world that he approves of torture, thumbing his nose at a basic international norm of legality and decency.
What is entirely unprecedented is his willingness to use the word “torture” — a crime by definition — while openly defending it.
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Aleppo’s people are being slaughtered. Did we learn nothing from Srebrenica?

I was a teenager when I faced the worst of humanity. I remember our house burning to the ground and my family fleeing Srebrenica, hoping against hope for a chance to live. I remember the torture, and the smell of blood. I didn’t know it yet, but I was living through the worst genocide in Europe since the second world war. And afterwards, I remember the promises of “never again”.
Those promises are being broken, hour after hour, day after day, in the deepening horror of east Aleppo. More than 500,000 people have died since war began in 2011. Imagine it. Years of cluster bombs, rockets and toxic gas raining down, funeral after funeral, death after death, while the world looks on and watches your country and your people being destroyed.
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