Tag Archives: pompeo

Donald Trump Doesn’t Like Dealing With Peasants

by RosemaryCaird5 Posted on May 30, 2017

Mother Jones

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The Washington Post reports that President Trump prefers to receive his daily intelligence briefing in comic book form, but we already knew that. However, this is new to me:

Most mornings, often at 10:30, sometimes earlier, Trump sits behind the historic Resolute desk and, with a fresh Diet Coke fizzing and papers piled high, receives top-secret updates on the world’s hot spots. The president interrupts his briefers with questions but also with random asides. He asks that the top brass of the intelligence community be present, and he demands brevity.

….Though career intelligence analysts often take the lead in delivering them, Trump likes his political appointees — Pompeo and Coats — to attend, along with national security adviser H.R. McMaster. Pompeo and Coats, whose offices are in McLean, Va., have had to redesign their daily routines so that they spend many mornings at the White House.

It’s appropriate for the intelligence chiefs to be present periodically. But forcing two of them to blow off an hour or two of their time every day isn’t. It’s dumb management.

So why does Trump do it? Mostly for ego and dominance reasons, I suppose. He might also still be convinced that the intelligence community is his enemy and will play games with the orders he gives them. So he wants his own appointees present to make sure they do what he wants.

These are both the marks of an insecure leader. It’s not a good sign.

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Donald Trump Doesn’t Like Dealing With Peasants

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Trump Is Reportedly Considering Reopening CIA "Black Site" Prisons

by CarsonBrownell Posted on January 25, 2017

Mother Jones

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President Donald Trump is considering reopening the notorious CIA “black site” prisons, undoing the ban imposed by President Barack Obama, after his new CIA director suggested he’d be open to using torture methods on detainees.

The administration’s plans were reported by the New York Times on Wednesday after the paper obtained a draft executive order titled “Detention and Interrogation of Enemy Combatants.” The order would roll back many of the restrictions on detainee interrogations and detention that Obama put in place, including one that gave the International Committee of the Red Cross access to all detainees in US custody. But in his daily press briefing on Wednesday afternoon, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said the draft was “not a White House document.”

The CIA’s black sites were a series of facilities located in various countries around the world where the CIA detained, questioned, and often tortured detainees with practices including waterboarding, confinement in small boxes, beatings, and extreme sleep deprivation. They were exposed in 2005 by the Washington Post’s Dana Priest.

The draft doesn’t direct the CIA to reopen the sites immediately, but it requests policy reviews to make recommendations to Trump. As the Times‘ Charlie Savage notes, Trump pledged during the presidential campaign to reinstate waterboarding and a “hell of a lot worse” and said that even if torture tactics didn’t work, the detainees “deserve it anyway.”

Throughout the draft, phrases such as “jihadist” and “global war on terrorism” are crossed out and replaced with “Islamist,” “radical Islamist terrorism,” and similar phrases.

Shortly after news of the order broke, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) released a statement condemning the use of torture. “The President can sign whatever executive orders he likes,” McCain said. “But the law is the law. We are not bringing back torture in the United States of America.”

The draft order comes five days after Mike Pompeo, since confirmed as CIA director, suggested he was open to torture techniques. In written answers to the Senate Intelligence Committee after his January 12 confirmation hearing, Pompeo seemed to leave the door open for a review of the ban on torture methods such as waterboarding. During his hearing, Pompeo had given a seemingly contradictory answer, saying he would “absolutely not” restart the CIA’s use of such techniques and adding that he couldn’t “imagine he would be asked by the president-elect or then-president” to have the CIA torture someone.

The full three-page draft, posted in full by the Washington Post later Wednesday morning (and later by the Times), lays out the rationale for the review:

Our Nation remains engaged in a global armed conflict with ISIS, al Qaeda, the Taliban, and other associated international jihadistIslamist terrorist groups. This conflict is not of our choosing, but was declared against us by the jihadistterrorist organizations groups that have plotted and carried out mass attacks against the United States, its citizens, and its allies beginning well before the atrocities of September 11, 2001, and continuing to this day…Experience has also shown that obtaining critical intelligence information is vital to taking determined offensive action, including military action, against those groups that make war on us and that are actively plotting further attacks.

While there have been continuity in many of the military and intelligence policies of the United States in the global war on terrorism,fight against radical Islam, the United States has refrained from exercising certain authorities critical to its defense.

The draft, which contains extensive editing notes, would rescind two of Obama’s executive orders: one to close the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and the other to give the Red Cross access to all detainees. It also orders the director of national intelligence, the attorney general, and the director of the CIA to “recommend to the President whether to reinitiate a program of interrogation of high-value alien terrorists to be operated outside the United States and whether such program should include the use of detention facilities operated by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).”

This story has been updated to include the statement from McCain and the comment from Spicer.

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Trump Is Reportedly Considering Reopening CIA "Black Site" Prisons

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Trump’s CIA Pick Doesn’t Seem to Understand the President-Elect’s View on Torture

by DemiOfiubpwt Posted on January 12, 2017

Mother Jones

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The man picked by Donald Trump to be director of the Central Intelligence Agency apparently is in the dark on an important intelligence matter: Trump’s view on torture.

Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.) has been tapped by Trump to lead the spy service, and on Thursday morning he came before the Senate Intelligence Committee for his confirmation hearing. He addressed the matters in the headlines. He said he accepted the intelligence community’s assessment that Russian intelligence hacked Democratic targets during the 2016 campaign and then leaked material to benefit Trump. “It is pretty clear,” Pompeo said, noting the Russian motive was “to have an impact on American democracy.” Unlike Trump, Pompeo was fully embracing the intelligence community’s findings.

But Pompeo was also caught in a hack-related contradiction. Sen. Angus King (I-Maine), a member of the committee, pointed to a tweet Pompeo sent out in July declaring, “Need further proof that the fix was in from Pres. Obama on down? BUSTED: 19,252 Emails from DNC Leaked by Wikileaks.” King didn’t say this, but his point was obvious: With this tweet, the incoming CIA chief had helped a secret Russian intelligence operation to change the outcome of the presidential election. King did ask Pompeo, “Do you think WikiLeaks is a reliable source of information?” Pompeo replied, “I do not.” So, King inquired, why did he post this tweet and cite WikiLeaks as “proof”? Pompeo was busted. Pompeo repeated that he had never considered WikiLeaks a “credible source.” King pushed on and asked Pompeo how he could explain his tweet. Pompeo stammered and remarked, “I’d have to go back and take a look at that.” Uh, right.

Another awkward moment came when Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) questioned Pompeo about the use of torture. “If you were ordered by the president,” she asked, “to restart the CIA’s use of enhanced interrogation techniques that fall outside the Army field manual”—meaning waterboarding and other methods now banned by law—”would you comply?”

“Absolutely not,” Pompeo said. He pointed out that he had voted for the law that banned waterboarding and other acts of torture that the CIA had used during the Bush-Cheney years. “I will always comply with the law,” Pompeo declared. (In 2014, however, he claimed that the interrogation techniques in use during the Bush administration were not torture.)

But Pompeo also said this: “I can’t imagine I would be asked by the president-elect or then president” to have the CIA engage in torture.

His imagination, then, is rather limited. During the presidential contest, Trump made headlines with his promise to revive waterboarding and to use other means of torture. During one of the Republican primary debates, Trump was quite firm on this point. He was asked about former CIA Director Michael Hayden’s remark that the military could defy orders from the president to torture or kill civilians, and Trump went on a roll:

They won’t refuse. They’re not going to refuse, believe me. You look at the Middle East, they’re chopping off heads, they’re chopping off the heads of Christians and anybody else that happens to be in the way, they’re drowning people in steel cages, and now we’re talking about waterboarding…It’s fine, and if we want to go stronger, I’d go stronger too. Because frankly, that’s the way I feel. Can you imagine these people, these animals, over in the Middle East that chop off heads, sitting around talking and seeing that we’re having a hard problem with waterboarding? We should go for waterboarding and we should go tougher than waterboarding.

Trump was indicating that he didn’t give a damn about laws restricting the use of torture and that he would expect officials to follow any presidential orders to engage in such conduct. So how hard is it to envision that Trump, once in office, might order intelligence services and the military to use waterboarding and acts of torture that are “tougher than waterboarding”?

Pompeo was clear that his view on the use of torture is not in sync with Trump’s. He was clear that he would not follow an order to employ such methods. But he indicated that he didn’t understand his soon-to-be boss’ attitude toward torture. After all, it doesn’t take that much creativity to imagine Trump trying to follow through on his vow to bring back waterboading and much worse.

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Trump’s CIA Pick Doesn’t Seem to Understand the President-Elect’s View on Torture

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Hitler Comparisons, Santa Impersonators, and “Al Qaeda’s Best Friend”: Highlights From Tuesday Night’s GOP Primaries

by KelleyCooley Posted on August 6, 2014

Mother Jones

The Obama Cousin Who Compared Obama to Hitler Just Lost His Kansas GOP Primary

Fred Blocher/Kansas City Star/ZumaPress.com

Unseating an incumbent senator is always difficult, but Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kansas) presented an enticing challenge. In an interview with the New York Times, Roberts said he sleeps on a friend’s recliner on the rare occasions he returns to Kansas. Later, in a radio interview, he admitted that he tries to return to Kansas “every time I get an opponent.” Roberts might have been in trouble against a serious challenger. Instead he faced political newcomer Milton Wolf, whom he dispatched by seven points on Tuesday.

Wolf’s qualifications as a Kansas tea party activist began with his family tree. He is a second cousin of President Barack Obama—whom he compared to Hitler—and a doctor, qualifications that earned him invitations to appear on cable news and talk radio to critique the Affordable Care Act as an unconstitutional attack on Americans’ liberties. But Wolf’s hopes of becoming the next great conservative insurgent candidate died in February at a Topeka diner, where a reporter from the Topeka Capital-Journal confronted him about images on his Facebook page (deleted before the campaign) of x-rays he’d taken of gunshot victims. Although billed as a tea party vs. establishment showdown, the Roberts-Wolf race was more of a referendum on social media protocol. And in Kansas, the verdict is clear: You shouldn’t post x-rays of gunshot victims on Facebook. —TM

GOP Rebel Justin Amash Just Beat a Guy Who Called Him “Al Qaeda’s Best Friend”

Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) AP

The GOP’s business establishment talked openly about making conservative hardliners pay for pushing Washington toward a debt ceiling crisis last fall. But that wave of Chamber of Commerce-funded primary challengers to conservative incumbents never materialized. The Chamber settled on trying to take out Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.), a second term congressman and Ron Paul disciple famous for voting on no on pretty much everything—even the Paul Ryan budget—and for cobbling together a bipartisan coalition to rein in the NSA’s domestic surveillance programs. It was the first part that drew the ire of business interests in his district, and the second part that made him the villain in one of the year’s nastiest campaign ads. Amash, challenger Brian Ellis warned, was “Al Qaeda’s best friend” in Congress.

Ellis received a rare primary endorsement from an incumbent member of Amash’s Michigan delegation, GOP Rep. Mike Rogers, an NSA defender. But we’re not in 2002 anymore; it turns out Amash’s civil libertarianism plays pretty well in the western Michigan district that gave America Gerald Ford. Boosted by deep-pocketed donors of his own (including the DeVos family), Amash eased past Ellis, making him a sure-thing to win a third term in November. —TM

Michigan GOP Primary Results: “Foreclosure King” Beats Santa Impersonator

Trott for Congress; Kerry Bentivolio/Facebook

The War on Christmas seems to comes earlier every year: Rep. Kerry Bentivolio (R-Mich.), a Santa impersonator who was elected to Congress by accident in 2012, was defeated in a 30-point landslide on Tuesday, becoming this year’s first (and probably only) victim of the Republican establishment’s dissatisfaction with congressional tea partiers.

Bentivolio won his party’s nomination two years ago in a fluke after the incumbent, Rep. Thad McCotter, failed to qualify for the ballot and abruptly resigned. (A high school teacher and reindeer rancher, Bentivolio was the only Republican left on the ballot.) Bentivolio never fully sold himself as a serious congressman—he once promised to hold a hearing on chemtrails, the conspiracy theory that airplanes are brainwashing Americans with poison—making him an obvious target, despite winning the backing of Speaker of the House John Boehner.

More interesting than Bentivolio, who always had a placeholder feel to him, is the man who trounced him the primary—David Trott, a high-powered Republican donor whose law firm happens to process most of Michigan’s foreclosures. As one registrar of deeds in southeast Michigan put it in December, Trott & Trott “made a living off of monetizing human misery.” A big donor to the pro-Romney super-PAC Restore Our Future, and a member of the 2012 GOP presidential nominee’s Michigan finance committee, Trott is an archetypal establishment Republican.

But he’ll still have his work cut out for him: Romney won the 11th district by just four points in 2012. He’ll take on the winner of the Democratic race between former CIA analyst Bobby McKenzie (backed by national Democrats) and urologist Anil Kumar. —TM

Tea Partier Staves Off Primary Challenge in Koch Country

Todd Tiahrt (left) and Rep. Mike Pompeo (right) at a July debate in Wichita. Mike Hutmacher/AP

Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.) withstood a challenge from his predecessor, former Rep. Todd Tiahrt, in a battle for the House district that’s home to Charles Koch, the billionaire GOP donor and industrialist, and his company, Koch Industries. Tiahrt was a close ally of Koch Industries during his House tenure in the ’90s and 2000s, taking in more than $329,000 from the company’s PAC and employees over the course of his career. But Pompeo—whom Tiahrt handpicked to replace him when he ran for US Senate (and lost) in 2010—has since become Koch’s favorite son. The company endorsed Pompeo this time around. Koch’s backing boosted the incumbent’s monetary advantage. As of July 16, Pompeo had raised a little over $2 million, while Tiahrt had only drawn $155,000 (with just $65,000 left in the bank).

Pompeo was the incumbent, but his success is actually a win for the tea party. As a congressman, Tiahrt was a founding member of the House tea party caucus. But for his comeback attempt, he ditched his prior conservative persona and ran as a moderate, even populist Republican, arguing for the reinstatement of earmarks and questioning Pompeo’s support for NSA spying. Conservative groups, including the Club for Growth, FreedomWorks, and Americans for Prosperity lined up to support Pompeo, a tea party favorite since he joined the House in 2011. There won’t be a revival of moderate conservatism in Kochland anytime soon. —PC

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Hitler Comparisons, Santa Impersonators, and “Al Qaeda’s Best Friend”: Highlights From Tuesday Night’s GOP Primaries

Posted in Anchor, Casio, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Hitler Comparisons, Santa Impersonators, and “Al Qaeda’s Best Friend”: Highlights From Tuesday Night’s GOP Primaries