One big meme of the last couple weeks is that Donald Trump is finally feeling comfortable as president and is ready to start doing things his way, at long last! Notably, he seems to be doing so in a way that hearkens back to his reality TV past: by firing people. Rex Tillerson, whose manly name likely got him hired as secretary of state yet was not talisman enough to save him from ignominious dismissal, has been the biggest head to roll. There are rumors that National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster will go soon as well.
But just as life and death exist in an intricate balance, firings are cosmically joined to hirings. Tillerson may be gone, but his position is not, and so Donald Trump has nominated CIA director Mike Pompeo as the new secretary of state. In Pompeo’s place at the CIA, the president has named Gina Haspel, currently a deputy at the agency. But while Trump may be feeling Tillerson-level manly with all this secretary-appointing and position-swapping, this has presented an even greater test of the Democrats’ cajones: because no rational political calculation would allow either of these nominees to get through the Senate without a vicious fight.
Many in the media may talk about the president engaging in a second year re-set, but where Mike Pompeo is concerned, the crucial context for evaluating this nomination is the mounting evidence of collusion between the Russian government and the Trump campaign. As noted in this Politico piece, there are plenty of questions Democrats can ask about Donald Trump's communications with Pompeo around the Russia investigation. The last thing we need as secretary of state is someone who shares Donald Trump’s willingness to kowtow and otherwise practice bizarre subservience to Vladimir Putin.
The nomination of Gina Haspel requires, if anything, an even greater dose of evaluative woop-assery. Haspel was deeply involved with the torture of detainees during the Bush administration; she ran a torture site in Thailand, and enabled the elimination of video evidence of waterboarding. As a former Department of the Navy lawyer argues here, these are disqualifying activities, no matter how great Haspel’s managerial skills might be.
The fact that Haspel still has a job at the CIA, let alone could be nominated to head the agency without being laughed out of town, speaks volumes about our country’s failure to reckon with and punish the Bush-era torture regime. One of that administration’s most self-defeating acts was to piss away America’s moral high ground versus al-Qaeda and its ilk; substituting sadism for proven interrogation techniques, torturing prisoners was less about extracting information and far more about revenge, at the price of violating the very values we claimed to be defending. That most Americans chose to ignore or suppress their knowledge of these heinous acts done in our collective name does nothing to change the fact that they happened, and that they blurred the line between the bad acts of al-Qaeda and the bad acts of Americans in a way that only helped the extremist cause. Torture turned out to be the choice of the incompetent and the morally bereft, as the same leaders who OK’d such practices also undertook an occupation of Afghanistan that lasts to the present day and an invasion of Iraq that is a contender for the single most catastrophic and counterproductive foreign policy action in U.S. history.
It feels inevitable that our newest worst president would be unable to avoid the temptation of appointing a torture supporter to head the CIA. Donald Trump has voiced support for torture in the past, and you can be sure that his choice of Haspel signals that torture is once again to be accepted as U.S. policy. Last week, I noted the challenge of keeping up with the rush of news out of this administration, and how to prioritize responses. Well, this one is a no-brainer. Appointment of a torturer to head the CIA is a story to pay attention to, and is a story that concerned citizens can do something about. Call your senators, and let them know that you oppose Haspel as CIA director, and Pompeo as Secretary of State. Torture is immoral, unconstitutional, counter-productive, and evil; it’s a renunciation of civilized values that, when implemented in our name, degrades us all, and brings our country down to the moral level of the terrorists themselves.
