Just Foreign Policy has begun a petition on Change.org which helps you tell your Senators to reject the nomination of former House Rep/current CIA chief Mike Pompeo for Secretary of State. I keep harping on Mr. Pompeo's apparent belief that merely using encryption for your online communications constitutes evidence of wrongdoing, but we should also oppose his nomination because he embraces torture and he has a hard-on for war with Iran -- a war that would go considerably worse than the Iraq adventure, and that adventure gave us ISIS. A strong nation doesn't need to bomb the crap out of every weaker nation that offends it, because a nation's strength depends on the goodness of its people and the responsiveness of its institutions. And when right-wingers want to bomb the crap out of everyone who offends them, you have every right to wonder: are they bereft of faith in the strength of our nation, or are they merely evil?
But wait, there's more! If Mr. Pompeo ascends to Secretary of State, that'll leave his current position of CIA director open -- and the President has appointed CIA deputy director Gina Haspel to replace him! Ms. Haspel, unfortunately, has shown a similar taste for torture, having run a CIA "black site" in Thailand and directed the destruction of torture videos made there. The Senate also just so happened to find in 2009 that none of Ms. Haspel's torture resulted in actionable intelligence, but of course you already suspected that. And again, a strong nation doesn't need to torture people. So CREDO helps you tell your Senators to block the nomination of Gina Haspel to CIA director. No use saying that Ms. Haspel couldn't torture someone if she wanted to, because she could still send prisoners to black sites like the one Ms. Haspel used to run -- where, again, one can torture prisoners until they tell you what they think you want to hear, instead of the truth. No real security comes from that.
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