It takes much to make a figure like Rex Tillerson seem not merely sane but competent. The Trump administration, with its almost paranormal sense of revisionism and fantasy, has managed to make old Rex seem mildly credible. His sacking, inflicted with adolescent petulance, was bound to happen.
I wonder how Rex Tillerson feels about being the first high-level federal official to be fired publically and online, in one brutal tweet. I’m sure he expected the hammer to come down on him, but not like that. And I wonder if he will come forward to describe what led up to it. Unlikely, as he’s an extremely wealthy and still influential corporate player who would have little to gain from telling all. Still, some intrepid journalist should take Rex to lunch and encourage him to cry in his beer.
President Donald Trump’s nominations of Gina Haspel to lead the CIA and Mike Pompeo to be America’s top diplomat are the latest indications of steadily eroding human rights standards in the United States and the rollback of the rule of law that has characterized U.S. counterterrorism policies since Sept. 11, 2001.
Not only did the new CIA Director personally oversee the torture of Abu Zubaydah, she did so in order to lie you and your mom into supporting the aggressive war against Iraq.
From David Rose’s report “Tortured Reasoning“:
The declining human rights standards on display with the Haspel and Pompeo nominations are the latest in a long line of policy failures that include the Obama administration’s lack of prosecutions of Bush-era torture, Nat Parry notes. By Nat Parry…Read more →
(SP) — President Donald Trump nominated CIA Deputy Director Gina Haspel to succeed Mike Pompeo as director of the agency. Haspel was briefly in charge of a black site prison and helped destroy evidence to cover up torture. The possible promotion is but another consequence of the failure and refusal among President Barack Obama’s administration and the […]
WASHINGTON (AP) — Gina Haspel’s colleagues describe her as a seasoned veteran who would lead the CIA with integrity. Human rights advocates see her as someone who supervised torture at a secret prison.
President Donald Trump’s pick to be the next — and first female — director of the clandestine agency has conflicting public reputations. If confirmed, the 61-year-old career spymaster will succeed Mike Pompeo, who is replacing ousted Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.
“If Obama had allowed prosecutions over CIA torture, ‘people like Haspel, quite plausibly, could have gone to prison.’ Instead, she’s going to run the CIA.” (COMMONDREAMS) Human rights advocates are expressing outrage on Tuesday after President Donald Trump nominated deputy director Gina Haspel—”an actual torturer“—to be the next CIA director despite her leading role in running an agency black […]
In an article published in Al-Monitor without a single verifiable citation, Israeli journalist, Shlomi Eldar, went to unprecedented lengths to divert attention from the corruption in his country.
He spoke of Palestinian journalists – all speaking on condition of anonymity – who ‘applauded’ and ‘admired’ Israeli media coverage of corruption scandals surrounding the country’s rightwing Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
Israeli authorities and armed forces carried out extrajudicial executions, tortured Palestinian prisoners and targeted human rights defenders, Amnesty International’s new annual report says.
2017 “marked the 50th anniversary of Israel’s occupation of the [occupied] Palestinian Territories” (OPT), Amnesty noted, “and the 10th anniversary of its illegal blockade of the Gaza Strip.”
