Tuesday, March 13, 2018

The Trump Administration Just Got a Lot More Evil

 Mike Pompeo, pretty much total evil
By Robert Wenzel

Things have turned in a very bad direction in the Trump Administration with the firing of Rex Tillerson and President Trump's nomination of Mike Pompeo to succeed Tillerson at Secretary of State.

Pompeo, the current director of the CIA, is one evil dude.

Whereas Tillerson believed that Iran was complying with terms of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear deal with Iran, Pompeo is a serious Iran hater and will bring to the State Department a tone that is much more hostile to Iran and many other countries in the world.

Referring to the Iranian agreement, Pompeo has previously stated: “I look forward to rolling back this disastrous deal with the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism.” Pompeo also stated that a better option than negotiating with Iran would be to use “under 2,000 sorties to destroy the Iranian nuclear capacity. This is not an insurmountable task for the coalition forces.”

As was put in the Huffington Post back in November:
Cotton, Pompeo And Trump Are A Recipe For War With Iran
 On the other hand,
Pompeo loves Isarel, In November 2015, Pompeo visited Israel and stated that "Prime Minister Netanyahu is a true partner of the American people" and that "Netanyahu's efforts to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons are incredibly admirable and deeply appreciated".

Pompeo supports the surveillance programs of the National Security Agency, referring to the agency's efforts as "good and important work."

He stated that "Congress should pass a law re-establishing collection of all metadata, and combining it with publicly available financial and lifestyle information into a comprehensive, searchable database. Legal and bureaucratic impediments to surveillance should be removed. That includes Presidential Policy Directive-28, which bestows privacy rights on foreigners and imposes burdensome requirements to justify data collection.

He opposes the closing of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. After a 2013 visit to the prison, Pompeo said, of the prisoners who were on hunger strike, "It looked to me like a lot of them had put on weight.

In February 2016, Pompeo said Edward Snowden "should be brought back from Russia and given due process, and I think the proper outcome would be that he would be given a death sentence."

And things get worse from here.

Trump has nominated Gina Haspel to replace Pompeo as Director of the CIA.

Glenn Greenwald wrote last year:
In May 2013, the Washington Post’s Greg Miller reported that the head of the CIA’s clandestine service was being shifted out of that position as a result of “a management shake-up” by then-Director John Brennan. As Miller documented, this official — whom the paper did not name because she was a covert agent at the time — was centrally involved in the worst abuses of the CIA’s Bush-era torture regime.

As Miller put it, she was “directly involved in its controversial interrogation program” and had an “extensive role” in torturing detainees. Even more troubling, she “had run a secret prison in Thailand” — part of the CIA’s network of “black sites” — “where two detainees were subjected to waterboarding and other harsh techniques.” The Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on torture also detailed the central role she played in the particularly gruesome torture of detainee Abu Zubaydah.

Beyond all that, she played a vital role in the destruction of interrogation videotapes that showed the torture of detainees both at the black site she ran and other secret agency locations. The concealment of those interrogation tapes, which violated multiple court orders as well as the demands of the 9/11 commission and the advice of White House lawyers, was condemned as “obstruction” by commission chairs Lee Hamilton and Thomas Keane. A special prosecutor and grand jury investigated those actions but ultimately chose not to prosecute.

The name of that CIA official whose torture activities the Post described is Gina Haspel.
Robert Wenzel is Editor & Publisher of  EconomicPolicyJournal.com and Target Liberty. He also writes EPJ Daily Alert and is author of The Fed Flunks: My Speech at the New York Federal Reserve Bank. Follow him on twitter:@wenzeleconomics and on LinkedIn. His youtube series is here: Robert Wenzel Talks Economics. The Robert Wenzel podcast is on  iphone and stitcher.

Sources:

The Washington Post


The Intercept


The Huffington Post


Wikipedia



UPDATE

3 comments:

  1. "Mike Pompeo, pretty much total evil"

    Be sure to let us know when you hear about a deepfake version of the scene with Dark Vader and Luke Skywalker replaced by http://FakeApp.org with Donald Rumsfeld and Mike Pompeo.

    I can see it now... "Mike - I - AM - YOUR - FATHER!"

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1fIH6GMIJg

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  2. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  3. Haven't we been told for years that gender diversity would bring different views to the table?

    ReplyDelete