This past Tuesday, the news went
something like this: Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was abruptly fired to
deny him the “honorable” way out by just asking him to send in his resignation;
Tea Party bigot and far-right hardliner Michael Pompeo is to replace him; Gina Haspel,
his second-in-command at the CIA, is tapped to replace him; another senior
Trump aide with no government experience was shown the door; during his trip to
California to spread the Trump gospel of hatred and xenophobia, one of his
supporters were caught on camera tearing up a Mexican flag and attempting to
burn it; and Britain’s prime minister, Theresa May, announced new sanctions
against Russia.
Well, so what you say. This is all
part of the “fake” news about nothing, right? Who cares that the Trump
administration is fast running out of “adults” in the room. The “last straw”
for Trump was Tillerson supporting May’s claim that the Russian government was
behind the poisoning of former Russian double-agent Sergei Skripal and his
daughter with the deadly Russian-made nerve agent Novichok. Since May announced
the expelling of 23 Russian “diplomats” who are suspected of being undeclared
intelligence agents and other sanctions, Trump has hypocritically decided to
back those actions after the fact. Tillerson was on the “outs” with Trump
anyways, so was this a case of a petulant Trump unhappy with a “rogue” player
who wasn’t getting proper “guidance” on how not to upset Trump with more
evidence of his good buddy Vladimir Putin’s shenanigans? For that matter, why
is Trump so desperate to keep the Mueller investigation from crossing the
“redline” into his financial dealings with Russia, if he has done nothing
“wrong”?
Trump proposes to replace
Tillerson with the current CIA director, Pompeo, a man who has no known
diplomatic experience. Pompeo rode the Tea Party wave into the House of
Representatives in 2010, and his ideology is typical of that “movement,” with
far-right proclivities on every issue. He was an early and vociferous supporter
of Trump, and was naturally “properly” rewarded. As CIA director, he knew how
to coddle Trump, a man who values “loyalty”—which, of course, means being blind
to his many faults and feeding his narcissism; Trump has shown time and again
that his own loyalty comes at a serious moral and ethical cost. For example, it
was learned that during his briefings with Trump, Pompeo was careful never to
mention intelligence about Russian activities out loud. Not so fortunate was long-time
aide John McEntee, who fell into Trump’s trap of skirting ethical
considerations in business dealings, finding out the hard way that Trump has no
loyalty toward people “dumb” enough to get caught; before he could confront Trump, McEntee received a personal escort out of the building. Maybe he’ll talk, which is a
cost Trump will have to face.
Pompeo may run into trouble at
his confirmation hearings. At least one Republican, Rand Paul, has said he will
vote against confirming him as Secretary of State. Paul claims that he (and
Haspel) is too much the warhawk who wants “to manipulate the president into the
sphere of the neocons who never met a war they didn’t want to star in.” Others
have noted that in terms of his military credentials and support of torture, he
fits Trump’s requirements supporting the engagement of naked power over compromise.
Richard Boucher, a former diplomat who teaches at Brown University, has been
quoted as saying that in Pompeo Trump sees a man “who see every problem as a
threat that needs to be dealt with by military force, rather than an issue that
can be countered through diplomacy. There’s an over-all failure by this
Administration to understand what diplomacy can do for the country—and the
world.”
No sooner did Trump tap Pompeo as
Tillerson’s replacement he announced that he had the privilege to tap Haspel as
the first female as head of the CIA. Unfortunately, this is another example of
being the “first” doesn’t do much to advance the cause of gender politics. Perhaps gender advocates will applaud this,
although there is every possibility that it will only further undermine their
credibility—in Trump lingo, “victory” at any cost. Haspel was an undercover CIA
operative and her record is technically “secret.” But we know that in 2002 she
personally oversaw a “black site” in Thailand where two alleged Al-Qaeda
detainees were not only tortured, but tortured under the personal supervision
of Haspel. One interrogation tape that was not illegally destroyed by Haspel
showed that she took personal delight in the performance of torture of at least
one of the two detainees held there, despite his protestations that he was just
a low-level operative. According to former CIA officer and whistleblower John
Kiriakou on Democracy Now,
We did call her Bloody Gina. Gina was always very quick and very
willing to use force. You know, there was a group of officers in the CIA’s
Counterterrorism Center, when I was—when I was serving there, who—I hate to
even make the accusation out loud, but I’m going to say it: who enjoyed using
force. Yeah, everybody knew that torture didn’t work. That’s not even the
issue. Lots of different things work. Was it moral, and was it ethical, and was
it legal? I think the answers to those questions are very clearly no. But Gina
and people like Gina did it, I think, because they enjoyed doing it. They
tortured just for the sake of torture, not for the sake of gathering
information.
For “lighter” news on Tuesday,
Trump’s visit to California was the occasion for the usual scenes we’d expect
from Trump supporters. At the border, a group of white (well, almost all white)
people were shouting “USA, USA” and then “Burn it, Burn it” when a man who
appears to be Filipino grabbed a Mexican flag, proceeded to rip it to shreds,
and attempted to set the pieces on fire—although not too successfully with a
cigarette lighter. He can be heard declaring in an amusing accent “This is
America.” Apparently a woman tried to stop him, not because she disagreed with
his sentiments, but because people watching this might get the wrong
“message”—as if the xenophobic message of this bunch wasn’t clear enough.
The reason why I mentioned that a
Filipino was a part of this narrative is because this is one of those “clean-up
your own house” situations. Current Philippines president Rodrigo Duarte was
elected on his vow to kill 100.000 “criminals,” offering bounties of anywhere
from $1,400 for killing a drug peddler, to $85,000 for a “drug lord.” He’s even
urged “citizens” to double or triple their killing count of real or suspected
drug dealers. Even women are getting into the act; in one story I read a woman
boasted of the all the money she has made for her nocturnal human hunting
activities, claiming it is the only “job” available. Perhaps not surprisingly, church
and human rights groups have charged that no evidence of criminality is
required to carry out these killings, with the victims more likely random
targets or simply someone’s personal enemy.
So that was the news for one day this week. Just another day in the life of the nightmare that is the Trump
presidency.
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