Sure, the Republicans and Democrats may squabble on issues like transgender washrooms and abortion, but when it comes to the meat and potatoes of specific issues – war, spending, welfare, abandoning the constitution – they’re all the same. It’s just political theater.
This week, the Senate is confirming Gina Haspel’s nomination as the next head of the Central Intelligence Agency. She oversaw torture programs that violated both U.S. and international law, but she was never formally charged or reprimanded.
The GOP will likely vote for her confirmation, but Democrats are staging a fight, going the moral route.
But, as Senator Tom Cotton points out, the Democrats voted in favor of John Brennan, who was instrumental in torture programs. These Democrats included including Democrat Senators Dianne Feinstein (CA), Mark Warner (VA), Ron Wyden (OR), Martin Heinrich (NM), and Joe Manchin (WV), and Independent Sen. Angus King (ME).
Here is the clip:
Glenn Greenwald made an excellent point on Twitter this week:
The excuse of Nazi defendants at Nuremberg really was: “we weren’t to blame for war crimes because we were just following orders”: rejected by the Tribunal. It’s amazing to watch exactly this excuse be invoked to defend Haspel: “don’t penalize her for previous policy decisions”: https://t.co/OjXnoWEKbU
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) May 9, 2018
Torture doesn’t work and it’s illegal. If it were successful and legal, why wouldn’t police officers torture suspects to find out more information?
Oh, and it’s 2004 all over again. If you don’t support torture then you side with the terrorists. Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) has already been accused of that in a new Kentucky ad because he didn’t vote for Haspel’s confirmation.
Waterboarding is not torture.
On Feb. 22, 2017, ProPublica published a story that inaccurately described Gina Haspel’s role in the treatment of Abu Zubaydah, a suspected al-Qaida leader who was imprisoned by the CIA at a secret “black site” in Thailand in 2002.
The story said that Haspel, a career CIA officer who President Trump has nominated to be the next director of central intelligence, oversaw the clandestine base where Zubaydah was subjected to waterboarding and other coercive interrogation methods that are widely seen as torture. The story also said she mocked the prisoner’s suffering in a private conversation. Neither of these assertions is correct and we retract them. It is now clear that Haspel did not take charge of the base until after the interrogation of Zubaydah ended.
As a retired USAF MSgt, I believe this is all just lies and politics that the MSM and politicians spin, because they are sorry Hillary Rotten Clinton was not elected President.