CIA woman in torture controversy vaulted to number 2 slot

[DonViejo]

Source: Newsweek


04 FEB 2017 AT 10:21 ET

For more than a year, former top CIA officials have assured anyone who would listen that the agency had no intention of heeding Republican Donald Trump’s campaign call to “bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding.”

Likewise, the spy agency’s new director, former Representative Mike Pompeo (R-Mich.), promised Congress during his confirmation hearings that he would “absolutely not” jump-start waterboarding or other “enhanced interrogation techniques” that had been outlawed by President Barack Obama after years of exposés, scandals and bitter debate.

But the CIA on Thursday reopened an old wound with the appointment of Gina Haspel, a career undercover operator, as its second-highest-ranking official. During the George W. Bush administration, Haspel operated one of the agency’s interrogation “black sites,” in Thailand, where waterboarding was repeatedly applied to terrorist suspects. Not only that, she signed off on a memo from her boss authorizing the destruction of internal interrogation videotapes as congressional investigators began poking around.

Critics pounced. “We are obviously still so strongly opposed to her appointment,” Raha Wala, director of national security advocacy at Human Rights First, told The Washington Post. “Her fingerprints are all over the torture program, not to mention destruction of evidence.”

Read more: http://www.rawstory.com/2017/02/cia-woman-in-torture-controversy-vaulted-to-number-2-slot/

[guillaumeb]

1. Draining the swamp while following the law?

Well, perhaps later.

[Marthe48]

2. maybe trump is picking the worst to try to look better

big.fail.

[DK504]

6. Katiscracy

Hiring the least qualified person for the job.

[FairWinds]

3. Few people are aware that those who engage in torture . .

have PTSD rates that are off the charts.

When folks endorse torture, they are giving a big
thumbs up to sentencing other Americans to a lifetime
of severe mental illness.

And, oh yeah, it doesn't work either.

And this is not to make light of the victims, many of
whom are innocent of any wrong doing.

And of course it is contrary to US and international law,

Obama violated his oath by not prosecuting the Bush era
torturers.

Veterans For Peace

Example -

"On June 10, 2013, 30-year-old Iraq War veteran Daniel Somers killed himself after writing a powerful letter to his family explaining his reasons for doing so.

“My mind is a wasteland filled with visions of incredible horror, unceasing depression, and crippling anxiety, even with all of the medications the doctors dare give,” reads the letter, which Somers’ family allowed Gawker to publish. Somers went on to reveal the source of his pain:

During my first deployment, I was made to participate in things, the enormity of which is hard to describe. War crimes, crimes against humanity. . . "

[Solly Mack]

4. K&R

[Blue Idaho]

5. Someone needs to get this black widow out of government

By any means necessary.

[DK504]

7. Isn't illegal to destroy governmental documents?

" ... she signed off on a memo from her boss authorizing the destruction of internal interrogation videotapes as congressional investigators began poking around. "

I heard a rumor it's illegal.

[Wounded Bear]

8. Is she subject to senate confirmation? nt