JOHN KIRIAKOU: The Dark Past of Biden's Nominee for National Intelligence
Director
December 29, 2020
There were three controversial areas where Avril Haines made a name for
herself and for which she should have to answer in a confirmation hearing.
White House with 2020 holiday decorations. (White House, Flickr)
By John Kiriakou
Special to Consortium News
Former acting CIA Director Mike Morell, who has disingenuously argued for
years that he had nothing to do with the agency's torture program, but who
continued to defend it, has taken himself out of the running to be
President-elect Joe Biden's new CIA director.
The decision is a victory for the peace group Code Pink, which spearheaded
the Stop Morell movement, and it's a great thing for all Americans. Now,
though, we have to turn our attention to Biden's nominee to be director of
national intelligence (DNI), Avril Haines.
Haines is certainly qualified on paper to lead the Intelligence Community.
A longtime Biden aide, she has the president-elect's confidence. But that's
not good enough. Haines is exactly the kind of person who shouldn't be in a
position of authority in intelligence. She is the kind of neoliberal
intelligence apologist whom so many of us have opposed for so many years.
Don't just take my word for it, though. Look at her record.
Haines first began working for Biden when she served as deputy general
counsel of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when Biden was its
chairman. When Biden became vice president in 2009, Haines moved to the
State Department, where she was the assistant legal adviser for treaty
affairs. After only a year, she moved to the White House, where she became
deputy assistant to the president and deputy counsel to the president for
national security affairs, the National Security Council's chief attorney.
Avril Haines, at center facing, with President Barack Obama at right, and
other aides, July 13, 2015. (White House Flickr, Pete Souza)
That's quite a position. What it means was that her job was to legally
justify President Barack Obama's decisions on such intelligence issues as
drone strikes and whether to release the CIA Torture Report. She served
there under CIA Director John Brennan. Obama apparently liked the job she
did for him because in 2013, he named Haines deputy director of the CIA
(DD/CIA).
Haines was the first woman to be named DD/CIA, and she served again under
Brennan, who proved time and again that he was no fan of congressional
oversight. Haines's attitude was similar to Brennan's: The CIA was going
to do what it was going to do, and she would make no apologies for it.
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There were three controversial areas where Haines made a name for herself
and for which she should have to answer in a confirmation hearing: The
CIA's refusal to release the Senate Torture Report and the decision to hack
into the Senate Intelligence Committee's computer system; the CIA's decision
to not punish those officers who carried out the hack and who killed and
tortured prisoners beyond even what the Justice Department said was
permissible; and the government's drone program, in which hundreds, perhaps
thousands, of civilians were killed.
Drone "pilots" launch an MQ-1 Predator unmanned aerial vehicle for a raid in
the Middle East. (U.S. military)
Haines' Torture Cover-Up
You may recall that in December 2014, the Democratic staff of the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee released a heavily redacted version of the
executive summary of the committee's torture report, the result of years of
investigation using primary-source CIA documents. The executive summary was
about 525 pages long, just a fraction of the nearly 6,000-page complete
report. And the release of the 525 pages was the result of protracted
negotiations between the committee and the CIA.
In the end, the public heard a few details of what the CIA's prisoners
underwent at secret prisons around the world. But the full story was never
made public. It likely never will be. And that's thanks to Avril Haines.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein in 2010. (Steve Jurvetson, Flickr, CC BY 2.0,
Wikimedia Commons)
Earlier that year, then-Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne
Feinstein took to the Senate floor in a very unusual display and accused CIA
Director Brennan of spying on her committee's staff members. Specifically,
Feinstein said that CIA officers had hacked into the Senate's computers to
see what it was that committee investigators were focusing on.
The hacking was unprecedented, and Feinstein referred it to the Justice
Department for prosecution. Attorney General Eric Holder, however, chose
not to pursue the case. Brennan took responsibility for ordering the
hacking and he made no apologies for it. But his top aide, his assistant,
his legal adviser through the episode was Avril Haines. She has never
explained her decisions in support of the hack.
Furthermore, it was Haines who overruled the CIA's inspector general and who
decided not to punish those CIA officers who hacked into the committee's
computers, or those CIA officers who had gone over and above what the
Justice Department had authorized in its "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques"
program, killing and maiming prisoners.
In the end, not only were no CIA officers punished, but the leaders and most
prominent officers in the torture program were promoted, in some cases into
some of the most sought-after positions in the CIA. I know this to be true.
I worked for them.
Haines and Drones
One area in which Haines has not received a great deal of media coverage has
been her role in the drone program. When Haines was the National Security
Council's top lawyer, Brennan was the keeper of the so-called kill list. It
was Haines who took phone calls in the middle of the night asking her for
legal authority - permission - to launch missile attacks from drones. She
has never answered for her actions.
Now is the time for Americans to put down their collective foot on Biden's
national security appointees. Morell was utterly inappropriate for a senior
position in the Biden national security apparatus. Haines is, too. She
has, very simply, committed crimes against humanity. I'm under no illusions
that Biden is a progressive or that he will differ greatly from previous
Democratic presidents on national security.
But I do believe that wrong is wrong. Avril Haines is exactly the kind of
person we don't want running the Intelligence Community. This the moment
for opponents of her nomination to lobby senators on the Intelligence
Committee. There's still time to defeat her.
