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posted by Fnord666 on Saturday May 19 2018, @06:09PM   Printer-friendly

Veteran spy Gina Haspel will become the first female director of the CIA after six Democrats joined Republicans in a Senate confirmation vote that overrode concerns about her role in the spy agency's harsh interrogation program after 9/11.

Thursday's 54-45 vote split both parties, and the margin was the closest for a CIA nominee in the nearly seven decades that a nod from the Senate has been required. Haspel, who has spent nearly all of her 33-year CIA career in undercover positions, is the first career operations officer to be confirmed since William Colby in 1973.

Haspel, 61, is a native of Kentucky but grew up around the world as the daughter of an Air Force serviceman. She worked in Africa, Europe and classified locations around the globe and was tapped as deputy director of the CIA last year.

Source: Fox News

Also at the New York Times, CNN[warning: autoplay video], and Vox among others.


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  • (Score: 2) by requerdanos on Sunday May 20 2018, @09:23PM

    by requerdanos (5997) Subscriber Badge on Sunday May 20 2018, @09:23PM (#681965) Journal

    Lawful does not necessarily equal moral and vice versa.

    That's absolutely correct, and something people often forget.

    In the moral climate of the time, "finding out what the terr'ists know" was considered the overarching moral good by many people, and "is this particular method legal" was considered simply red tape.

    If you were in the CIA at the time, you may well have considered the moral good to be to find out what the prisoners know, even if torture was declared to be not torture and you were required to use the not-torture torture to find it out. Can't answer the hypothetical one way or another, but it's still not as cut and dried as you and many others are making it out to be here.

    The moral climate has changed in a few significant ways since then, and she's being judged by the standards of now applied to her behavior then. But she seems to have changed along with everyone else.

    "Befehl ist befehl" was not a legal defense at Nuremberg, and is not one now.

    A pretty significant difference is that the government that 'ordered' these atrocities and considered them legal--has prosecuted nobody for committing them and isn't likely to--is still in power, is unrepentant, and isn't facing any sort of threat to being in power at all, much less significant opposition. And that's the government that decides what's legal and is calling for the wide-ranging violations ranging from listening in on our phone and internet up to and including years of torture as "interrogation".

    There have been a few minor personnel shakeups, but the [R] and [D] superparty of bigger government, removing freedoms, spy on its own citizens, and torture foreign nationals under the guise of "interrogating" them is still very much a going concern, and nothing's changed, even if the narrative doesn't immediately continue to include "waterboarding" now that they are finished with it for now. (Remember, when you get a new president, you don't get a new government, just a new figurehead for the same old government.)

    Attention voters in that country: If these thread-godwinizers are representative of you in any way, then you have the duty to vote only for [I]s, libertarians, greens, anyone BUT the [R] and [D] evildoers who currently constitute that country's evil, oppressive government. The [R] or [D] by their name means they expressly support this system under which torture was declared legal. It may yet be possible to turn it around (or it may already be too late).

    Don't be fooled [freworld.info] -- know the similarities between them as well as the differences.

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