Rudy Giuliani and Donald Trump: This Will End Badly. And Probably Soon.

By Rick Wilson, The Daily Beast

10 May 18

Giuliani knows Trump well enough to know that Trump will turn on him fast. Here’s a preview of how this is going to go in the coming weeks.

ike a bloated, portly fake billionaire rolling off a hooker after a hot 45 seconds of passionate sex, Donald Trump’s ardor for Rudy Giuliani seems to have cooled.

If the White House leaks are any barometer, it sounds more and more as if Donald wants Rudy to get his money off the nightstand and the hell out of his room at the No-Tell-Motel. This is what happens when you work for Trump, and Rudy is old enough, crafty enough, and knows Trump well enough to have known better.

Trump’s hiring of my old boss is a triumph of today’s Trump-right media bubble, where nothing matters but the coverage on Fox & Friends, Hannity, Sinclair stations’ nightly Two Minutes of Hate, and on the nut-site constellation that comprises conservative “news” sites. Trump didn’t hire Rudy for his skills as a litigator, or as a warrior in the high-speed low-drag social-media world of today. He was hired to break shit and make loud noises, and he’s damn good at it. Unfortunately for Rudy, that probably won’t be enough to save him from the Trump curse.

Trump has been mostly unable to hire and retain top-flight litigators because he destroys everyone around him. His record of stacking former staffers like cordwood as they are either fired, humiliated, shamed, permanently scarred, forced to cut off a finger by the Yakuza, morally compromised, or moved into the Witness Protection Program will go down in presidential history. It’s no secret that he’s a spectacular liar at all times and on all subjects, leaving his legal team constantly wary they have a client who combines a stubborn streak and a self-destructive nature with an endless capacity to lie to them about his marital, financial, and political lies.

However, like so many others who should know better, Rudy staked his legacy on one last waltz with Trump, and may soon learn why no one else wanted the job.

Trump follows a clear pattern with his employees, hangers-on, camp followers, and six-degrees-of-separation edge cases who trail him like chunks of matter kicked off some fecal comet hurling across the political firmament. The pattern is abundantly evident at this point, and it’s one Rudy should realize applies to everyone in Trump’s sphere of crapulous influence.

Here’s a preview, Mayor, of how this is going to go in the coming weeks:

You’re already out of the honeymoon phase, but I’m sure it was nice while it lasted. It always happens with Trump appointees: He praises you in his intense, hyperbolic way. Even if you’re a wily, hardened person, those blandishments tend to make his appointees drop their panties faster than a high-school cheerleader in the back of the quarterback’s van for a simple reason: the praise isn’t just from the president.

Sure, it’s nice when the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue sings your virtues, but the amplification mechanism of Fox News, Infowars, Breitbart, and others are so passionate and so fulsome that you really want to hoover up another rail of that ego powder. Then come the Trumpsplaining pieces in the gentry conservative outlets praising you as the One Who Got Trump Right and Is Turning Everything Around.

Then come the leaks. This White House has a singular leaker at the very top, and by now you should know that 70 percent of the time when “sources close to the president” bitchslap you to the press, you can just strike the words “sources close to” from the sentence. Trump is like some veldt animal at the edge of a muddy river, continually sniffing the wind for a scent; all he cares about is how the coverage reflects on him, so if he perceives an even slightly negative tone, the people sacrificing their reputations for him go under the bus.

Add to that the crew of Jared and Ivanka, hard at work with their Lil Machiavels playset. They hate you because haters hate. Duh. Throw in Hapless Leaker, and dead-man-walking John Kelly, Kellyanne von Munchausen, and the shitbird chorus on the outside of Trump’s political family and no one gets out of here alive.

To save yourself, you’ll make the mistake of trying to give him advice. Sensible, correct, legitimate advice. That’s the worst thing you can do because Trump parses counsel as critique and guidance as discipline. At that point, you’re dead, even if you’re too stubborn to lay down and start stinking up the place.

You’ll keep swinging, struggling, trying to gain purchase in a wilderness of tweets and confusing signals, but once Trump is bored and restless enough, the “we’re about to fire him” rumor machine gets spun up. At that point, it’s only a matter of time before Donald’s itchy Twitter finger gets the best of him and he fires you.

I went to work for Rudy in 1997 during his re-election campaign for mayor, along with my business partner at the time, Adam Goodman. We were the upstart Florida guys who somehow scored the work of the mayor who was then becoming known as the man who turned New York around. I formed some of the closest and most enduring friendships of my life on that campaign. All legacies are complex, and Rudy’s is certainly not without its faults, mistakes, rough edges, and excesses. In the 20 years that have passed since, I’ve often pondered the inflection points of Rudy’s career.

The first was his tenure as mayor. Tireless, restless, aggressive, imperfect, hands-on all the time. Good Rudy loved that job more than life itself. He was built for it, racing to fires, building collapses, jumping out of the Suburban and into every crisis. He was Batman; nocturnal, judgmental, sometimes questionable in his methods, but pursuing an order too lacking in a city that had drifted for too long. When he was Bad Rudy, it was often to fix a worse problem.

The second inflection point was 9/11. 9/11 tested Rudy, broke him, rebuilt him, and changed something deep in his soul. His finest moments came in those dusty, terrifying streets where the death toll was still unknown and unknowable, where fires marked the eternal gap in the city’s skyline and Lower Manhattan was a landscape of ash. He took on the mantle of leadership at a moment of horror, and it is the knowledge of what he did that day that sharpens the painful contrast to the man he now serves.

The third point came when he took this job. Trump is a man who offers his employees and supporters little in return for their sacrifice. He will, as he always does, sacrifice even a personality and a legacy as bold as Rudy’s. The doom is already in the air, and the president’s unrivaled appetite for the destruction of all who serve him is growing.

As mayor of New York City, Rudy never ducked a fight. As Trump’s attorney, he’s in a fight he can’t win, because his opponent isn’t Robert Mueller, or Michael Avenatti, or Stormy Daniels. His opponent, and the man willing to burn him and his legacy to the ground, is his client, Donald J. Trump.

An Open Letter to Gina Haspel From Someone Who Was Physically Tortured

By Theo Padnos, Rolling Stone

10 May 18

Let's talk about the past

ear Ms. Haspel,

I understand you are now against torture, after supporting it before. Great. As a torture victim, I'm very happy to hear this news.

I hope you won't take it the wrong way, however, if I say that I doubt the sincerity of your change of heart. Let's be honest. There isn't much proof that you regret what you did. The evidence suggests that you helped to cover up for American torturers. Meanwhile, at least in the torture facilities I've known, the officials who get with the program – by which I mean carry out every order in silent obedience – tend to move up in the hierarchy. I assume you're discovering the same thing right now on the day of your Senate confirmation hearing.

Because it's not exactly clear that the torture era at the CIA really is over, and because I think I learned something about the torture business during my years in a series of torture prisons, I'd like to tell you about my experience.

My torturers happened to be members of the al Qaeda "system," as they call their organization. The first of their prisons I came to know was in the basement of the National Eye Hospital, in Aleppo, Syria. It was the winter of 2013.

Lying on the floor of my cell, listening to other torture victims scream and waiting to be tortured myself, I found that my thoughts often turned to the culture of places in which torture happens. I wondered: Don't torture bureaucracies tend to resemble one another? I had a feeling, for instance, that torturers tend to abuse their victim until he or she produces the answer they're looking for. I had better be ready with some true-sounding answers, I told myself. I also knew, in the half-certain way prisoners know things, that an "investigation," as the al Qaeda people call their torture sessions, might happen once, or a handful of times, or it might go on for months. When will it end for me? I wondered. And if it ends in death, how will that happen, exactly? I didn't want to reflect too much about this last question, but in that situation, in case you'd like to know, it's pretty much impossible not to think about it. All the time.

I knew, from general reading I had done at home, that in almost all such situations, there are blindfolds. There are humiliations. So it was in Aleppo in the weeks before I was tortured the first time.

Then it began. I learned right away about the electrical wires. Some of these, it turns out, are just for show. But some are real. That winter, I learned that they almost always want you to feel you are close to death when they are doing their thing to you. But just because they want you to feel this way does not mean that people around you are not dying. If you've ever heard torture happening (as perhaps you have, Ms. Haspel?) you will know that there is no science to this art. If the torturers are annoyed, and even if they're not, they might kill their prisoner by accident.

Under such circumstances, what is a victim to do? For the record, and just so you'll know, on my first night in the torture room, I did try to tell them the truth. "I am a journalist," I said. This response so enraged my torturers, and seemed to bring me so close to death, that the tiny but somehow audible (and rather sensible, by the way) voice in my head screamed at me: Don't ever tell the truth again. Lie, you fool!

I did know what they wanted to hear. I knew this because they told me: "You are CIA." They screamed: "You know Guantanamo? Abu Ghraib?"

Switching strategies then, I screamed out a ridiculous saga, from God only knows what hole in my brain, involving success as a CIA spy in Yemen, a role in the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki (their suggestion), followed by a CIA promotion to Aleppo, where I was meant to spy on the Syrian al Qaeda system. I used their word for their organization. They seemed to like this.

But it was dark in that room. Many people were screaming. Some people were being hanged by their wrists. The noise and the ambient terror in that room were such that I quickly lost control of my story's details.

Later on, lying again on the floor in my cell, I devised a third tale. It accounted for the inconsistencies in the one I had told under torture, flattered the torturers' prejudices, involved money as a motivation – an idea the torturers seemed to like – and made detours through a half-dozen, totally fictitious but true-sounding details. There were cafe meetings in Istanbul. There were embassy contacts who gave me only their first names. There was CIA money for me and more money for the Muslims in Syria and Yemen I pressured into spying for the United States.

I forced myself to internalize this still more fantastic saga, as I had never forced myself to do anything before, then repeated the thing to myself, again and again. Though I had been awake during most of the previous two days, I did not sleep.

When they came for me later that night, I related my made-up tale. I'm not sure how this second performance went over. It brought on the same pain, which lasted about as long, and concluded with the same threat – "Tomorrow will be worse" – from the same commander. Yet neither in the following days, nor during the following weeks, did he return to my cell.

Naturally, during this period of non-torture, I began to wonder: What had happened to the young men who bore the weapons in the torture room to make them willing to induce such suffering in a helpless person? They told me they were doing much worse to their Syrian victims. What was going on in their brains? I thought about this matter but moved past it, too, because in the Middle East, particularly among the poor and the very religious, torture has established itself as an element in the air, like pollution. It hangs over the neighborhoods. Nobody wants it there, but when sons of the neighborhood grow up to attach themselves to the command structure that is committing the crimes, no one is particularly surprised. And my torturers thought of themselves as soldiers. They tortured because they had orders to torture. This fact didn't excuse them in my eyes, but it did help me understand what they were thinking. Precious little, I concluded.

For what it's worth, at the time, as I tried to trace the violence that was being done to me through a chain of causes, my thoughts alighted on the psychologists, subcontractors, CIA agents and legal experts who had found it within themselves to aid in the torture of prisoners at your famous "black sites." Those Americans, it seemed to me, had not cared enough to reflect on who might pay for their crimes when, in the fullness of time, the torture seeped into the Islamic world's collective unconscious, fructified, embodied itself in younger people, then crept again into the streets. By the winter of 2013, when I was undergoing my ordeal in the Aleppo eye hospital, some of those American torture officials had returned to jobs on leafy campuses. Others were moving up in the ranks. (Perhaps this scenario sounds familiar to you?) While I was waiting in a heap of bloody clothing for my torturers to return, those career success stories, I was certain of it, were waiting in drawing rooms in Washington and Berkeley. Tea was in the offing there, perhaps a lecture. Those tea drinkers at home I did not want to forgive.

In my opinion, a victim under such circumstances will sooner or later turn his thoughts to the normality of it all. A prisoner will be aware that torture happens sometimes in the earliest hours of the morning, sometimes after lunch, and often late at night. It happens when a new troop of enemies has been brought in, when no one new appears to have turned up for some time, frequently in the presence of certain commanders but then also in the absence of those commanders. In the torture room, itself, there will be people both young and old, military men, observers in civilian clothes, characters who might be religious officials and others who might work in legal fields. There will be onlookers and assailants; people who have to be held back and people who hold themselves back.

Why is this happening to me? This is a profound, agonizing, entrancing question for torture victims. They devote their days and nights to its contemplation. When torture happens as a matter of course, over long periods of time, the prisoner is likely to conclude that no single commander or command structure is responsible for these crimes, but, rather, that there is something unwell within the society outside the walls of the prison. What has gone wrong in that society that every few days it throws up new men who wish to stand around in dark rooms as other men are hanged from their wrists, flayed, then electrocuted until it is obvious to everyone that the body's life force has all but drained away?

There really is no single answer to such a question. It is a sinister riddle with a thousand half-right answers, none of which comfort the victim since all he wants is out.

I have a word of advice for American CIA officials – and any others you might employ – who could someday receive an order to torture. It has been well established that torturers often, if not inevitably, introduce a sexual element to their violence. So it was in my torture. I took it for granted, even as my interrogator was asking his questions, that he was using my torture to work through his sick sexual hang-ups. Later, in my cell, under my lice-filled blanket, I thought about the matter some more. The commander embodies the values of the command structure, I thought, and fits in well here because the topmost commander has communicated the things he treasures in life to his subordinates. I hadn't yet met the top al Qaeda sheikh for Syria then, but I could imagine him easily enough: he likely spent his days sitting on a gold-embroidered sofa somewhere, a vainglorious, reptile-like human being, watching TV. So he was, it turned out. When I finally met him, I knew from the half-smile that appeared on his lips when he threatened underlings with solitary confinement and flogging that he was happy to have established himself the lord of his personal torture realm.

Because President Trump's sexual aggressions have been so much a matter of public record, and because he has performed his enthusiasm for torture before cheering thousands ("They asked me about water-boarding. I said, 'I love it. I love it.'") can anyone doubt that people tortured under his orders will assume that his perversities have infected our military? If our soldiers obey his orders, if torture under Trump leads to where it so often leads, who can say those assumptions will be false?

For the sake of its honor, if for nothing else, U.S. officials must never obey torture orders from this president. And that includes you, Ms. Haspel.