Slashdot Mirror
Trump's Pick for New CIA Director Is Career Spymaster (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader shares a AP report: President Donald Trump's choice to be the first female director of the CIA is a career spymaster who once ran an agency prison in Thailand where terror suspects were subjected to a harsh interrogation technique that the president has supported. Trump tweeted Tuesday that CIA Director Mike Pompeo will replace Rex Tillerson as secretary of state and that he has selected Gina Haspel to replace Pompeo. Haspel, the current deputy CIA director, also helped carry out an order that the agency destroy its waterboarding videos. That order prompted a lengthy Justice Department investigation that ended without charges. Haspel, who has extensive overseas experience, briefly ran a secret CIA prison where accused terrorists Abu Zubayadah and Abd al Rahim al-Nashiri were waterboarded in 2002, according to current and former U.S. intelligence officials, who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.
So the first diverse CIA director ever who is being nominated IN THE MONTH OF THE WOMAN is being demonized on Slashdot I see?
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
So it's OK for her to be the Deputy director, but once she gets to climb one rung of the ladder that's a big problem?
Wasn't I married to her once?
Thanks CNN.
CNN before: "He's the ex CEO of Exon Mobil. He's trash"
CNN after: "Rex Tillerson is a Hero. He stood up to Trump"
Harsh interrogation technique supported by the President? You mean Obama, right?
I didn't get that impression from his Wikipedia page.
I'm against torture, (however much people use weasel words to underplay whatever "enhanced interrogation techniques" were used).
It brings us down to the level of those who seek to destroy our society and its hard-won liberties and values.
(I'm certainly not against them in battle or cold blood if they're caught in the act...)
I'm also against the increasing trend of leaking:
according to current and former U.S. intelligence officials, who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.
WTF? Intelligence officials briefing the press? Prosecute them!
Sorry, should read "...killing them in battle..." of course
So you're saying we should treat women differently and shouldn't be outraged that she destroyed video documentation to hide torture and approves of harsh methods as we would even if it were a man doing the same thing?
'Last idea I heard' Trump might not want that but his intentions are worthless. There are illegal immigrants to send back to Mexico while their US-born children stay in the country. The associated detention program will be overrun by "tough on crime" ICE jack-boots and, thanks to Trump, untrained local police. Multiple repeats of Abu Grahib will occur.
...then she'll make a great CIA director! 8)
Where's the option to mark a story with a -1 Troll? If this story were any more inflammatory it would contain trigger warnings for snowflakes.
Rex Tillerson was ill a couple days ago and I wonder if the fake news media is blowing this up as a ouster when in fact Tillerson is being replaced due to health reasons. Personally, I like Trump's style of rapid replace if need be, why keep people around if they don't perform or cannot perform their duties.
CNN before: "He's the ex CEO of Exon Mobil. He's trash". CNN after: "Rex Tillerson is a Hero. He stood up to Trump"
It is possible for both of those statements to be reasonable. It's possible for him to be trash, and also for him to be heroic.
This guy's great, one of the best. I want to welcome her/him on board.
[Wait 2 weeks]
Well it didn't work out but I want to thank him/her for his/her service.
Next!
So, Trump fired Tillerson just hours after this: https://twitter.com/ZekeJMille... . Delicious.
The word and the action is "TORTURE"
What are Pompeo and Haspel's views on the Russian state using chemical weapons to try to murder people in a NATO member country? Will Trump allow them to criticize his best pal Putin?
It's been five years since former US spy chief James Clapper lied to Congress about the NSA's giant surveillance program, and the statute of limitations for his crime is coming to end, guaranteeing him a peaceful retirement.
On March 12, 2013, Clapper, then director of national intelligence, knowingly lied to the US Select Committee on Intelligence, when he was asked by Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) whether the National Security Agency collected "any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans."
"No sir. Not willingly," Clapper said.
The full extent of Clapper's unabashed dishonesty was revealed to the world just three months later, when NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden leaked troves of documents to Wikileaks detailing the agencyâ(TM)s vast, warrantless surveillance of American citizens.
In 2009, professional baseball player Miguel Tejada pleaded guilty to lying to Congress after giving false testimony about performance-enhancing drug use in Major League Baseball.
"He admitted to lying to Congress and was unremorseful and flippant about it," Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) told the Washington Examiner. "The integrity of our federal government is at stake because his behavior sets the standard for the entire intelligence community." Massie was referring to Clapper, not the baseball player. Just to be clear.
In other news, an unprecedented number of former CIA agents are running for office in 2018 as Democrats. Once in the CIA, always in the CIA. They will always represent the Agency's interests, no matter what walk of life they progress to. Get out there and vote, people. Bring a couple of friends to vote. It's the only way we'll get our country back.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
It's extreme waterboarding with trump and kim jong. ONLY ON FOX NEWS!
Shouldn't it be "Spymistress"?
Or is that sexist?
We're hiring the best and brightest to come join the best team ever assembled in the history of teams. Benefits include:
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Leaking is remarkably rarely prosecuted, especially given how much administrations complain about it. The reason that administrations don't pursue leaking more aggressively is that the people in the administration want to preserve their own ability to leak.
Leaking is an essential part of the way government works. It's going over the head of the regular channels and appealing directly to the people. This can be done for both personal/professional reasons, and for patriotic reasons.
There has only been one exception to this pattern I can remember: the Obama administration. Obama didn't complain much about leakers publicly, he just quietly went after them. Only 13 people have ever been prosecuted under the Espionage Act of 1917, and eight of those thirteen were on Obama's watch.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Whether you like it or not, men DO NOT like having female bosses. Some women will also tell you that they only want a male boss. Placing a female in a position of authority over men has always caused problems in organizations. It will be no different here. Women are micro- managers. They do not have the ability to allow men and women their innate need to take the initiative to do a job.
Waterboarding, as practiced under the Bush administration, is not torture. It is simulated drowning that does no physical harm. It is not the same as water torture as practiced by the Japanese in WWII. The Japanese would force a hose down a victims throat and then pour water into the person until their belly was distended. Then the Japanese would beat the victims belly until it burst. That is torture.
Also, contrary to left wing propaganda, torture does work. That's why the armed forces have classes in how to resist torture. The final lesson of that class is that you will break but whatever 'secrets' you have are only useful for about 24 hours. After that, any damage that results is on your commanders for ignoring you were captured and knew the 'secret'.
When the current president has no respect for them why shouldn't they leak info regarding his tenure?
Fully licensed blockchain psychiatrist
Er, is being a career spymaster a bad thing for leading the CIA? Just wondering.
I'm also against the increasing trend of leaking:
according to current and former U.S. intelligence officials, who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.
WTF? Intelligence officials briefing the press? Prosecute them!
You do realize a lot of "leaks" are actually supported or directed by the administration or upper leadership of an agency, right? It's used as a way to control narratives, refute information that is about to be released by a news agency, as a way to get out information without making a formal statement, or even just to maintain relationships with friendly media.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
When Slashdot really was a bastion of tech nerd news. Now it's mired in nothing but political garbage. If I wanted Drudge, I'll go to that website.
I WANT NEWS FOR NERDS... WHERE DO I GET THAT ANYMORE? ANYONE?
I'm dreadfully serious here. Help a guy out.
The list of people who have either quit or have been escorted out of the White House by security continues to grow. The Trump administration has broken all records in regard to staff turnover, and it's only been a year.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/t...
THE BEST PEOPLE
You are welcome on my lawn.
How do you sell your soul? Who do you sell it to? What's it worth? If I sell my humanity, am I no longer human? If I sold my humanity, and am no longer human, wouldn't that then make me different from them, or are you saying they're not human either? Could I sell my humanity yet still be different from them?
Hmm... Hard to decide which one of the assholes I wanna waterboard first.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
1. Is waterboarding torture?
2. Has waterboarding ever extracted useful information?
3. What great harm does waterboarding do to those performing it? Please provide some factual info, not just your opinion
It starts to feel a bit like Celebrity Big Brother. Every week someone else has to leave.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I don't really have an opinion on Haspel, I am just very encouraged that Trump appointed someone who seems qualified for the position.
Given his track record, I honestly wouldn't have been surprised if he appointed the VP of marketing for Kraft foods the CIA director.
Who's a good boy? Who's a good boy?
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
https://twitter.com/AP_Politic...
Where does this nonsense come from? The people of America keep parroting that they are the "good guys" but who is deluding them into believing this garbage? Is it Hollywood with all their superhero movies? Is it the public education system? The media? The president? Obama once unironically claimed that Americans are exceptional. He said it with a straight face in public. LOL
By the way, what kind of a simple mind simplifies everything into "good guys" and "bad guys" anyway? I wonder if Americans even realize how the rest of the world views them. It must be quite a culture shock for those who manage to venture past their couch and refrigerator to find out that "good guys" is the last thing on people's minds when Americans are mentioned.
I'm also against the increasing trend of leaking
Why? Information frees.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
Her travel in Europe is somewhat restrictive, though since certain countries there would arrest her on sight, given her background in running Thai torture houses.
So you the dood who has never read a newspaper over the past 30 years, huh??? CIA's got a great record, you believe? Drop much acid, bubba????
Waterboarding by the CIA was something that helped terrorists. Our doing it gave a powerful recruiting tool to terrorist organizations: it allowed them to show that the U.S. are not the good guys. This was a stupid stupid thing to do, and we should object to her being Director because we should not reward people for doing stupid things in their job.
Oh yes, it was the waterboarding that led to ISIS and Al Qaeda believing the US was evil.
You mis-interpreted what I said. ISIS and Al Queda believe the U.S. is evil, and utilize America's use of torture as a recruitment tool to get people to sign on to that belief.
It had nothing to do with brainwashing, fanaticism, extremist religious leaders, or any of that.
They have to recruit. They have to turn people into fanatics, and they do that by showing that we are the bad guys, and they are the people opposing the bad guya. When our message is trying to be "we're the good guys, we want to help you," their pointing to the U.S. using torture pretty much zeros out that argument, getting people to listen to the fanaticism and extremist religious leaders.
Guilty of Crimes Against Humanity?.. dont worry, you fit right in with Trump's gang of pety criminals, raepists, and fascists.
Freedumbs for all!
What should be bothersome, esp to western allies, is that she is inept and only moved up by being part of the far right wingers. She is, for all intents and purposes, a far right fascists who does not care really about America, what we stand ( stood ? ) for, or even our Constitution.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
the type of person that is attracted to terrorist organizations has never, ever believed that the U.S. was part of the "good guys"... regardless of the existence of waterboarding methods.
This would be true if the world consisted of only two clearly distinct types of people "the type of person that is attracted to terrorist organizations" and the type that isn't, and if the type that "is" will always go and join Al Qaeda without any convincing. But the world is not, and they don't. People are anywhere in any range in between. Radicals have to be radicalized. Angry young men are plentiful, but they don't become terrorists until they have their anger focussed and fanned and, most particularly, given a target. "Terrorists" don't pop up out of nowhere, they are recruited and radicalized.
They might get radicalized to say "my country is repressive, I need to fight for more freedom for myself and my brothers." They might say "I need to fight to leave my country and go to America where I can open a falafel stand and get rich." Or they might get radicalized to "America is evil and wants to destroy us and our way of life and we need to fight it."
Our use of torture is a tool that gets organizations like ISIS or Al Qaeda the ability to take these angry young men and turn them to that last option.
Just like you can't convince a truther than 9/11 wasn't a conspiracy, a birther that obama is an american, a fookooshimar that fukushima will kill every single person in japan and then some, a typical terrorist has an image of the West that does not need to be based in reality or fact.
But how did that "typical terrorist [who] has an image of the West that does not need to be based in reality or fact" become a terrorist? How do they get that image of the west? They are radicalized. We are giving the terrorist organizations the tools to do that.
I take you've never met anybody from the middle east, right? They aren't born saying "I need to kill infidels". They have to be recruited.
We get rid of the idiot that is making this stuff happens and all the idiots who are on their knees letting him do it. The Republican party has no backbone. They let this twitter buffoon do whatever he wants to the detriment of our nation. It is time real Patriots step up and get rid of these fools and all their alt-right white nationalist idiocy. Time to take back our nation from the nazis like our grandparents did in the old days.
Thanks for posting some counter points vs the groupthink. It's interesting to consider all sides of an issue.
On much of this, we are ALL talking to of our ass. We simply do not know. We really can't answer "is water boarding torture" for two reasons. First because we haven't experienced it and don't really know what it's like. We can only parrot what someone said on our favorite echo-chamber TV program. Secondly, the question itself is absurdly binary. Water boarding is clearly very unpleasant. It's also clearly far less severe than most of what what traditionally be considered torture. There is a continuum, a range of degree, and framing it as a yes/no question is silly.
We can't really answer the other questions brought up, for the same reasons. "Does water boarding work?". Again treating that as a yes/no is silly. Of course subjects may give untrue answers, so there is a need to think about whether their answers are logical and consistent with other information available. (And "consistent with" doesn't mean "duplicative"). Also as you point out we train our special forces how to limit the amount and importance of the information they reveal because prisoners DO reveal valuable information. A good question would be "how well does water boarding work under each of the following sets of circumstances ...?". The answer will be different under different circumstances. Probably none of us here are interrogation experts, so none of us know how well it has worked under any given set of circumstances.
Lacking so much relevant information, here's my opinion:
As a general policy, the United States should stand as a beacon of freedom, liberty, and human rights. The US is not a nation created around a certain ethnic group, the country was created based on certain principles; we should exemplify those principles.
Having said the above, in the very RARE case that we capture someone who has knowledge of an ongoing plan to blow up a bunch of innocent people, our agents should stop that disastrous attack using whatever methods are necessary to get the information from the murderous terrorist we've captured. And I don't want to know what they did to the terrorist. Handle it. Those instances are very rare.
And they are America's literal equivalent to concentration camps.
Especially, because as a German, I know very well, how little we Germans were actually aware of the horrors going on in there, back then. We just as much believed them to be what you now believe those black sites to be.
Wikipedia once had a page with a map and list of a couple of them. That site mysteriously ... vanished. (If you know where that one with the map is is, please post a link.)
I still know that the Polish prime minister resigned, after it was found out, that there was one of those "black sites" on Polish grounds. (Which isn't exactly a funny thing to Poles, given how much it instantly reminds them of the POW and concentration camps that their people suffered in.)
Dear America: Please don't become us. We were us, and it sucked, even for us! To say the least ...
Also, there won't be any powerful world leader countries to pull you out. (I can't imagine China and Russia and the EU sending troops to a country with that many nukes.)
So he nominates first ever woman. Per all the other blathering on the internets about women, she should have smooth sailing through confirmation. Inoculates against attacks from the left .
Brilliant move.
Whether or not your a Trump supporter, isn't a large number of firings exactly what's to be expected if he's "draining the swamp"?
These are all bureaucrats within the administration, not elected positions. The fear this brings you notwithstanding, hiring and firing here is the job your country elected him to do.
He's firing people that he hired. So, if that's "draining the swamp" then it means that he brought the swamp with him in the first place.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Since we're talking about trump, could you continue telling us all the reasons Obama was worse? Ya know, since Hillary didn't win. Is there nothing we can't blame on Obama?
If you elect an ex-CIA boss to president in the next elections, the US would finally have someone to match Putin (more or less).
At least, they could talk shop quite easily.
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
Or the GDR? Or North Korea? Or China? Or Soviet Russia? Etc.
People are deluded about laws and rights being "absolute". They forget that paper only means something, if the people with the biggest clubs adhere to it. The law of the jungle is, has, and will always be the only law. Everything else is a rule enforced by the rulers.
That's why "intellectual property" is so silly. Actual (physical) property is property, precisely because if somebody tries to take it from you, he gets his ass kicked by the rulers, or by you. If that isn't the case, we can say it's your property as much as we like... reality won't care. If it will be taken, it will still be taken, and stop being yours, until you manage to take it back.
And with "intellectual property", due the laws of physics (esp. the limits of causality), that is impossible to enforce. (Apart from it only existing for a bunch of cokehead criminals to leech actually hard-earned money from us by abusing artists, without having to work for it in return.)
...
Why dont he just pluck us vets eyes out and pour in salt.
Nothing good happening at VA ever.
Leaking, like espionage, is often a genuinely good thing for human civilization, because they can reveal intentions in a way that well-prepared media events do not.
When I find out who's been hiring all these terrible unsuitable people, I'm going to fire the guy, no questions.
Suddenly the new law in Poland regarding Polish Concentration Camps has an interesting spin on it that I hadn't previously considered.
The more interesting aspect to this is that the former CIA director is becoming head of State.
What country is going to want to meet with the U.S.'s former head spy (responsible for such things as rendition, water-boarding, Guantanamo Bay, etc.)? Or, even allow him into their country? No country that values human rights would.
That along with all of the open positions he hasn't even tried to fill and it looks like Trump is trying to kill off the State Department. Is this his first move in turning himself and his family into Caesars?
To say that torture doesn't work is to say that all of the torture done to extract information for millennia doesn't work. You'd think that after a couple of thousand years of torturing people and finding that it always yields nothing that someone would say "Hey, this is a waste of time!" before the US in the politically correct age we're in where we feel that we have to treat terrorists with compassion.
Just because of that, I have a hard time not calling BS whenever I hear that torture doesn't work. It does work, it has worked, and anyone arguing otherwise is ignoring reality and replacing it with feel-good hippy crap.
If you want to argue morality, then we could have a discussion based on something with valid points. Arguing that it doesn't work is BS.
Abu Zubaydah:
Zubaydah was extensively interrogated; he was water-boarded 83 times[2] and subjected to numerous other torture techniques including forced nudity, sleep deprivation, confinement in small dark boxes, deprivation of solid food, stress positions, and physical assaults. While in CIA custody, Zubaydah lost his left eye
The woman is a monster. A regular patriot in US military.