The Irreverent Revenant Is Resurgently Relevant

All this talk of Trump's CIA head pick, former 9/11-era torture maven Gina Haspel, and her disastrous confirmation hearing yesterday (so bad in fact that John McCain has turned on her) has had the effect of re-engaging the "debate" of whether or not torturing people is a good idea, and by "debate" I mean the Nameless One has risen from the Void and hungers once more.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney said the U.S. should restart its enhanced interrogation techniques — often considered torture — after the issue was thrust to the forefront during Gina Haspel’s confirmation fight to become CIA director.

Yeah, that first sentence is a piece of work by the way.  Thanks, Politico.

 

“If it were my call, I would not discontinue those programs,” he said in an interview that aired Thursday morning on Fox Business. “I’d have them active and ready to go, and I’d go back and study them and learn.”

And feed on their souuuuuuuls.

Cheney has long defended the post-9/11 tactics even as the national climate shifted over the years. Congress has since banned them. 

“I think the techniques we used were not torture. A lot of people try to call it that, but it wasn’t deemed torture at the time,” he told Maria Bartiromo. “People want to go back and try to rewrite history, but if it were my call, I’d do it again.”

Just a friendly reminder that the GOP was awful and repugnant well before Trump, and white people put them back in power anyway.

Haspel, the acting director, faced a barrage of Democratic questions on the morality of techniques like waterboarding at her Senate Intelligence Committee confirmation hearing Wednesday. She oversaw a secret CIA facility in Thailand where two suspected terrorists were subject to them — one on her watch — in 2002 and later pushed for the destruction of tapes of the interrogations.

That should have been the end of Haspel's career.  Alas, it was not.

“I think she’d be a great CIA director,” Cheney said. “I think she’s done a great job in terms of the career she’s built, and the people I know at the agency are very enthusiastic about having one of their own, so to speak, in the driver’s seat at the CIA.”

I bet they are.  Hey listen, "Dick Cheney thinks this is a good idea" should be a pretty big disqualifier for everything, but in the Trump era it's a bonus!

By my math, McCain and Manchin are trading places, so Haspel will still get 51 votes and probably more.  If I'm Rand Paul, I'm calling Susan Collins and seeing what I can get out of the White House while I can.