Difference between revisions of "Tom Cotton"

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'''Tom Cotton''' is a member of the U.S. Senate from [[Arkansas]]. He served two combat tours in the [[2003 Invasion of Iraq]] and received - among other rewards - a bronze star. <ref>https://theintercept.com/2017/10/18/is-there-a-more-dangerous-member-of-congress-than-tom-cotton/</ref> Called a "a hard-charging guy" and "very influential with the [[Republican]] conference", he is a one of the most vocal, even infamous US senators, voting for sanctions against [[Russia]] - against [[Donald Trump]]'s advice - while calling for increased military presence in [[Asia]] (if not banning Chinese students first) and being responsible for a controversial letter in [[2015]] send to [[Iran]].
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'''Tom Cotton''' is a member of the U.S. Senate from [[Arkansas]]. He served two combat tours in the [[2003 Invasion of Iraq]] and received - among other rewards - a bronze star. <ref>https://theintercept.com/2017/10/18/is-there-a-more-dangerous-member-of-congress-than-tom-cotton/</ref> Called a "a hard-charging guy" and "very influential with the [[Republican]] conference", he is a one of the most vocal, even infamous US senators, voting for sanctions against [[Russia]] - against [[Donald Trump]]'s advice - while calling for increased military presence in [[Asia]] (if not banning Chinese students first) and being responsible for a controversial letter in [[2015]] sent to [[Iran]].
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==Military Career==
 
==Military Career==
 
Cotton voluntarily enlisted in [[2005]] going to [[Iraq]], after deeming [[Harvard]] and that world too sedentary. He served as an infantryman in his third year of law school while watching live news coverage of [[9/11]]. In October [[2008]], Cotton was deployed to eastern [[Afghanistan]]. He was assigned within the Train Advise Assist Command – in the Laghman Province as the Operations Officer of a Provincial Reconstruction Team, where he planned daily "[[counter-terrorism]]" and reconstruction operations.
 
Cotton voluntarily enlisted in [[2005]] going to [[Iraq]], after deeming [[Harvard]] and that world too sedentary. He served as an infantryman in his third year of law school while watching live news coverage of [[9/11]]. In October [[2008]], Cotton was deployed to eastern [[Afghanistan]]. He was assigned within the Train Advise Assist Command – in the Laghman Province as the Operations Officer of a Provincial Reconstruction Team, where he planned daily "[[counter-terrorism]]" and reconstruction operations.
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In June [[2006]], while stationed in Iraq, Cotton gained international public attention after writing an open letter to the editor of The [[New York Times]] about the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program or TFTP set up by [[George W. Bush]] and his administration in the "[[war on terror]]", after Treasury Secretary [[John W. Snow]] first called for prosecution of journalists of [[The Los Angeles Times]], [[Wall Street Journal]] and the NYT.<ref>http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/10/a-fateful-letter-to-the-editor-of-the-times.php</ref>, arguing three journalists violated "espionage laws" by publishing articles detailing classified government operations (that got response from multiple [[EU]] countries calling it violation of EU privacy laws as the US companies cooperating were headquartered in the  
 
In June [[2006]], while stationed in Iraq, Cotton gained international public attention after writing an open letter to the editor of The [[New York Times]] about the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program or TFTP set up by [[George W. Bush]] and his administration in the "[[war on terror]]", after Treasury Secretary [[John W. Snow]] first called for prosecution of journalists of [[The Los Angeles Times]], [[Wall Street Journal]] and the NYT.<ref>http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/10/a-fateful-letter-to-the-editor-of-the-times.php</ref>, arguing three journalists violated "espionage laws" by publishing articles detailing classified government operations (that got response from multiple [[EU]] countries calling it violation of EU privacy laws as the US companies cooperating were headquartered in the  
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Cotton called for the U.S. military to give “no quarter” to those who engage in theft and property destruction amid demonstrations against [[police]] brutality and the Minneapolis Police Department’s alleged murder of [[George Floyd]]. [[Judges]], scholars and [[activists]] responded<ref>https://lawandcrime.com/george-floyd-death/republican-senator-called-for-no-quarter-military-response-to-looters-lawyers-note-thats-a-war-crime/</ref> that "a no quarter order is a war crime, prohibited even in actual insurrection since Abraham Lincoln‘s signed the Lieber Code in 1863" (...) “Such an order is banned by international law and would, if carried out, be murder under American law and a violation of the Fundamental Guarantees of [[Geneva]] in Article 4, Rule 46 of Customary International Humanitarian Law, and section 5.5.7 of the [[Department of Defense]] Law of [[War]] Manual. Cotton did not retract the statements, but accused the people that responded of twisting his words and calling out [[twitter]] as a "low-level" employee called his office and tried to [[censor]] him by threatening to ban his account. The staff at the [[New York Times]] actually protested the op-ed (after the publisher and chairman Arthur Ochs Sulzberger issued a statement they ''supported<ref></ref>'' a piece that calls for war crimes on their own citizens, quite the newspaper) and the NYT promised this "rushed editing" would be reviewed to prevent such pieces from being released, which... drew more attention, as multiple editors resigned not clearly explaining how Cotton keeps getting published in the NYT.<ref>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-17/gop-s-cotton-says-twitter-threatened-to-lock-account-over-tweet</ref><ref>https://www.thewrap.com/new-york-times-tom-cotton-rushed-process/</ref>
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Cotton called for the U.S. military to give “no quarter” to those who engage in theft and property destruction amid demonstrations against [[police]] brutality and the Minneapolis Police Department’s alleged murder of [[George Floyd]]. [[Judges]], scholars and [[activists]] responded<ref>https://lawandcrime.com/george-floyd-death/republican-senator-called-for-no-quarter-military-response-to-looters-lawyers-note-thats-a-war-crime/</ref> that "a no quarter order is a war crime, prohibited even in actual insurrection since Abraham Lincoln‘s signed the Lieber Code in 1863" (...) “Such an order is banned by international law and would, if carried out, be murder under American law and a violation of the Fundamental Guarantees of [[Geneva]] in Article 4, Rule 46 of Customary International Humanitarian Law, and section 5.5.7 of the [[Department of Defense]] Law of [[War]] Manual. Cotton did not retract the statements, but accused the people that responded of twisting his words and calling out [[twitter]] as a "low-level" employee called his office and tried to [[censor]] him by threatening to ban his account. The staff at the [[New York Times]] actually protested the op-ed (after the publisher and chairman Arthur Ochs Sulzberger issued a statement they ''supported'' a piece that calls for war crimes on their own citizens, quite the newspaper) and the NYT promised this "rushed editing" would be reviewed to prevent such pieces from being released, which... drew more attention, as multiple editors resigned not clearly explaining how Cotton keeps getting published in the NYT.<ref>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-17/gop-s-cotton-says-twitter-threatened-to-lock-account-over-tweet</ref><ref>https://www.thewrap.com/new-york-times-tom-cotton-rushed-process/</ref>
  
  
 
==COVID-19==
 
==COVID-19==
 
Cotton has been part of the movement in the [[US Congress]] for the [[official opposition narrative]] that implicates the [[Wuhan Institute of Virology]] for [[COVID-19]]. Among other alarming statements he argued "[[China]] made a conscious choice not to close off its country to prevent the virus’s spread, but rather to let it spread “to ensure the Chinese economy wasn’t the only one to suffer", wants "more midrange missiles in [[Asia]], based on American territory in [[Guam]] and perhaps in allied countries as well, to counter Chinese midrange missiles" as well as "accelerate arms sales to [[Taiwan]]" and "pharmaceutical and medical-supply companies to move manufacturing out of China and back to the U.S., in part by allowing them to immediately write off capital expenditures made in doing so.".<ref>https://www.wsj.com/articles/tom-cotton-has-a-china-coronavirus-attack-plan-11589204375</ref>
 
Cotton has been part of the movement in the [[US Congress]] for the [[official opposition narrative]] that implicates the [[Wuhan Institute of Virology]] for [[COVID-19]]. Among other alarming statements he argued "[[China]] made a conscious choice not to close off its country to prevent the virus’s spread, but rather to let it spread “to ensure the Chinese economy wasn’t the only one to suffer", wants "more midrange missiles in [[Asia]], based on American territory in [[Guam]] and perhaps in allied countries as well, to counter Chinese midrange missiles" as well as "accelerate arms sales to [[Taiwan]]" and "pharmaceutical and medical-supply companies to move manufacturing out of China and back to the U.S., in part by allowing them to immediately write off capital expenditures made in doing so.".<ref>https://www.wsj.com/articles/tom-cotton-has-a-china-coronavirus-attack-plan-11589204375</ref>
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Revision as of 07:28, 11 July 2020

Person.png Tom Cotton   Twitter WebsiteRdf-entity.pngRdf-icon.png
(politician, soldier, deep state operative)
Tom Cotton knock.jpg
BornThomas Bryant Cotton
13 May 1977
Dardanelle, Arkansas, U.S.
NationalityUS
Alma materHarvard University, Claremont Graduate University
Children2
SpouseAnna Peckham
Member ofHouse and Senate Taiwan Caucus, International Republican Institute/Board and Staff
Interests • Foreign Policy
• Iran nuclear deal
• China
• Taiwan.
Interest ofSheldon Adelson
PartyRepublican

Employment.png US Senator from Arkansas

In office
January 3, 2015 - Present

Tom Cotton is a member of the U.S. Senate from Arkansas. He served two combat tours in the 2003 Invasion of Iraq and received - among other rewards - a bronze star. [1] Called a "a hard-charging guy" and "very influential with the Republican conference", he is a one of the most vocal, even infamous US senators, voting for sanctions against Russia - against Donald Trump's advice - while calling for increased military presence in Asia (if not banning Chinese students first) and being responsible for a controversial letter in 2015 sent to Iran.

Military Career

Cotton voluntarily enlisted in 2005 going to Iraq, after deeming Harvard and that world too sedentary. He served as an infantryman in his third year of law school while watching live news coverage of 9/11. In October 2008, Cotton was deployed to eastern Afghanistan. He was assigned within the Train Advise Assist Command – in the Laghman Province as the Operations Officer of a Provincial Reconstruction Team, where he planned daily "counter-terrorism" and reconstruction operations.

In June 2006, while stationed in Iraq, Cotton gained international public attention after writing an open letter to the editor of The New York Times about the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program or TFTP set up by George W. Bush and his administration in the "war on terror", after Treasury Secretary John W. Snow first called for prosecution of journalists of The Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal and the NYT.[2], arguing three journalists violated "espionage laws" by publishing articles detailing classified government operations (that got response from multiple EU countries calling it violation of EU privacy laws as the US companies cooperating were headquartered in the Europe) about "terrorists" and their finances (bear in mind that his program let Eliot Spitzer slip through[3]). The New York Times did not publish the letter, but three conservative lawyers did. Cotton called for the journalists to be prosecuted "to the fullest extent of the law", and incarcerated along with a lawsuit against the newspapers that is for "gravely endangering the lives of my soldiers and all other soldiers and innocent Iraqis." Cotton was deemed quite hawkish as the espionage act had never been used against journalists.[4][5]

Iran

Cotton was a leading figure in a letter signed by 47 of 53 republican senators to the leaders of Iran, that seemingly implied and warned Iran that congress and the forces behind congress will be longer around than Barack Obama and could revoke any executive deal they would make regarding the Iran nuclear deal. The letter was publicized numerous times in commercially-controlled media and attacked at numerous angles; according to CNN it violated the Logan Act[6][7], having a surprisingly poor Farsi translation[8], with Foreign Minister of Iran Javad Zarif and his ministry officially responding "the senators letter in fact undermines the credibility of thousands of such mere executive agreements that have been or will be entered into by the US with various other governments".[9]

““It has come to our attention while observing your nuclear negotiations with our government that you may not fully understand our constitutional system. Thus, we are writing to bring to your attention two features of our Constitution—the power to make binding international agreements and the different character of federal offices—which you should seriously consider as negotiations progress.

First, under our Constitution, while the president negotiates international agreements, Congress plays the significant role of ratifying them. In the case of a treaty, the Senate must ratify it by a two-thirds vote. A so-called congressional-executive agreement requires a majority vote in both the House and the Senate (which, because of procedural rules, effectively means a three-fifths vote in the Senate). Anything not approved by Congress is a mere executive agreement.

Second, the offices of our Constitution have different characteristics. For example, the president may serve only two 4-year terms, whereas senators may serve an unlimited number of 6-year terms. As applied today, for instance, President Obama will leave office in January 2017, while most of us will remain in office well beyond then—perhaps decades.

What these two constitutional provisions mean is that we will consider any agreement regarding your nuclear-weapons program that is not approved by the Congress as nothing more than an executive agreement between President Obama and Ayatollah Khamenei. The next president could revoke such an executive agreement with the stroke of a pen and future Congresses could modify the terms of the agreement at any time."”
Tom Cotton [10]


Waterboarding

““Waterboarding isn’t torture. We do waterboarding on our own soldiers in the military””
Tom Cotton [11]


Whistleblowers

He has been an advocate for more aggressive prosecution of whistleblowers and is a strong supporter of indefinite extension of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act or FISA-act. In particular he was pushing for permanently enabling Section 702 which grants US Intelligence warrantless monitoring of US citizens.[12]

“The attacks in London last weekend exposed in a matter of minutes just how vulnerable our free societies truly are. All it takes is a van or a knife and an unsuspecting bystander to turn a fun night out on the town into a horrific nightmare. Course, we shouldn't need any reminders, but let me give one yet again: We are at war with Islamic extremists. We have been for years, and, I'm sorry to say, there's no end in sight. It's easy to forget this as we go about our daily lives, but our enemies have not-and they will not. They've never taken their eyes off the ultimate target either: the United States..”
Tom Cotton [13]

War Crimes

Chinese students should be banned from studying in the U.S according to Cotton, as he suspects them of stealing vital knowledge for various parts of the Chinese government. Note that he tried to pass a bill on this in 2019, which is.... quite ironic hailing from the state of J. William Fulbright.[14]

Cotton called for the U.S. military to give “no quarter” to those who engage in theft and property destruction amid demonstrations against police brutality and the Minneapolis Police Department’s alleged murder of George Floyd. Judges, scholars and activists responded[15] that "a no quarter order is a war crime, prohibited even in actual insurrection since Abraham Lincoln‘s signed the Lieber Code in 1863" (...) “Such an order is banned by international law and would, if carried out, be murder under American law and a violation of the Fundamental Guarantees of Geneva in Article 4, Rule 46 of Customary International Humanitarian Law, and section 5.5.7 of the Department of Defense Law of War Manual. Cotton did not retract the statements, but accused the people that responded of twisting his words and calling out twitter as a "low-level" employee called his office and tried to censor him by threatening to ban his account. The staff at the New York Times actually protested the op-ed (after the publisher and chairman Arthur Ochs Sulzberger issued a statement they supported a piece that calls for war crimes on their own citizens, quite the newspaper) and the NYT promised this "rushed editing" would be reviewed to prevent such pieces from being released, which... drew more attention, as multiple editors resigned not clearly explaining how Cotton keeps getting published in the NYT.[16][17]


COVID-19

Cotton has been part of the movement in the US Congress for the official opposition narrative that implicates the Wuhan Institute of Virology for COVID-19. Among other alarming statements he argued "China made a conscious choice not to close off its country to prevent the virus’s spread, but rather to let it spread “to ensure the Chinese economy wasn’t the only one to suffer", wants "more midrange missiles in Asia, based on American territory in Guam and perhaps in allied countries as well, to counter Chinese midrange missiles" as well as "accelerate arms sales to Taiwan" and "pharmaceutical and medical-supply companies to move manufacturing out of China and back to the U.S., in part by allowing them to immediately write off capital expenditures made in doing so.".[18]


 

Events Participated in

EventStartEndLocation(s)Description
Bilderberg/20171 June 20174 June 2017US
Virginia
Chantilly		The 65th Bilderberg Meeting
Munich Security Conference/20131 February 20133 February 2013Germany
Munich
Bavaria		The 49th Munich Security Conference
Munich Security Conference/201612 February 201614 February 2016Germany
Munich
Bavaria		The 52nd Munich Security Conference
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References

  1. ↑ https://theintercept.com/2017/10/18/is-there-a-more-dangerous-member-of-congress-than-tom-cotton/
  2. ↑ http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/10/a-fateful-letter-to-the-editor-of-the-times.php
  3. ↑ http://overlawyered.com/2012/04/structuring-who-can-get-away-with-it-and-who-cant/
  4. ↑ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/tom-cotton/
  5. ↑ https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/11/tom-cotton-arkansas-new-york-times>
  6. ↑ https://edition.cnn.com/2015/03/10/politics/tom-cotton-iran-letter-logan-act/index.html
  7. ↑ https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2015/03/sen-tom-cottons-letter-to-iran-is-plainly-stupid-the-arkansas-freshman-and-his-senate-republican-colleagues-have-embarrassed-themselves-badly.html
  8. ↑ https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/03/30/sen-tom-cottons-farsi-version-of-his-explosive-letter-to-iranian-leaders-reads-like-a-middle-schooler-wrote-it
  9. ↑ http://en.mfa.ir/index.aspx?siteid=3&fkeyid=&siteid=3&fkeyid=&siteid=3&pageid=1997&newsview=330948
  10. ↑ https://www.cotton.senate.gov/?p=press_release&id=120 Tom Cotton
  11. ↑ https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/30/who-is-tom-cotton-cia/?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAACTXf6-kM6HdN1bAipj-dD0FHVXjt26ySEu6q8tFMJDsHr4P6QNUp8RTefnSe69YYFT-sIoNEouCQCaYkoPXMGEmWyEZeMR5yBwsL8hZd1PCws5AOxHe1DZP4wInDJmkdZ6yqWsNp01AxpVjZV8ej8ZJGQPhKX7k1S46j1BKQOox Techcrunch
  12. ↑ https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/30/who-is-tom-cotton-cia/?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAACTXf6-kM6HdN1bAipj-dD0FHVXjt26ySEu6q8tFMJDsHr4P6QNUp8RTefnSe69YYFT-sIoNEouCQCaYkoPXMGEmWyEZeMR5yBwsL8hZd1PCws5AOxHe1DZP4wInDJmkdZ6yqWsNp01AxpVjZV8ej8ZJGQPhKX7k1S46j1BKQOox
  13. ↑ https://www.cotton.senate.gov/?p=speech&id=696 US Senate
  14. ↑ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwG07p230O4
  15. ↑ https://lawandcrime.com/george-floyd-death/republican-senator-called-for-no-quarter-military-response-to-looters-lawyers-note-thats-a-war-crime/
  16. ↑ https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-17/gop-s-cotton-says-twitter-threatened-to-lock-account-over-tweet
  17. ↑ https://www.thewrap.com/new-york-times-tom-cotton-rushed-process/
  18. ↑ https://www.wsj.com/articles/tom-cotton-has-a-china-coronavirus-attack-plan-11589204375
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