© Carolyn Kaster/Associated PressIn this July 14, 2017, photo, President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump arrive on Air Force One at Newark Liberty International Airport, in Newark N.J., as they return from France.
As Air Force One flew home from Europe, news was set to break about a meeting that Donald Trump's eldest son had with a Kremlin-connected lawyer, promising yet another round of unwelcome headlines about the president and Russia. And that happened twice within a week.
The day-after-day drip-drip-drip of revelations over the past week about Donald Trump Jr.'s contact with the Russian lawyer in 2016 underscores the White House's inability to shake off the Russia story and close the book on a narrative that casts a shadow over Trump's presidency. No matter how presidential Trump may have looked on his back-to-back trips to Europe in recent days, the persistent questions about connections between Trump's team and Russia prevent him from savoring a public relations victory and building momentum for his stalled legislative agenda.
"No successful crisis management model works the way they are doing things," said Lanny Davis, who worked as special counsel to President Bill Clinton during his impeachment hearings. "If your mission is to control a story or try to end a story, you need to tell it early, tell it all and tell it yourself."
Comment: Obviously torture is never acceptable in any instance, so if Iraqi military forces are torturing people then that needs to stop. However considering the author's conflating these claims with unfounded claims of similar tactics in Syria while demonizing Russia, it may be the case that this is a tactic to make Iraq look bad in an attempt to justify more NATO intervention in Iraq.