Mistress of Torture Scales Summit Of CIA, An Event That Will Go Down In The Annals Of Feminism

At least, that's what the CIA propaganda campaign, aided and abetted by various media organs and stooges, would have us believe.

It's not every day that a CIA torturer is hailed as a feminist Icon.

Mistress of Torture Gina Haspel, Feminist Flag-Bearer? Really?

I don't think so. But that's one line of propaganda that was used to promote her as CIA Director to replace Michael "Death to Edward Snowden!" Pompeo, and is being echoed still after her successful promotion.

Oh, the quibbling and denials that would be hurled in reaction to "CIA torturer," if there was an actual political opposition in this country that was allowed to be heard in "official" forums, and in the "official" media. First of all, they refuse to call it torture. They prefer the Gestapo terminology, "enhanced interrogation techniques." Literally, that is the English translation from the Gestapo torture manual, and the CIA didn't just borrow the euphemism, they borrowed some of the "techniques" too. Sometimes "reporters" and "commentators" use the phrase "brutal interrogation techniques," I guess to show how daring and independent they are. Occasionally one is so bold as to say "torture," then quickly retreat back into the euphemisms.

When they stop using the euphemisms "law enforcement" and "intelligence agencies" for secret police, and "defense" for aggression, then I'll sit up and take notice.

The CIA quibblers and their enablers and protectors  would also seize on the technicality that the aforementioned CIA secret police officer, Gina Haspel, was merely in charge of a "black site" in Thailand, that is, a CIA torture center. She didn't do the dirty work with her own hands. For some reason, the CIA was squeamish about torturing people inside the U.S. Maybe they didn't want to rely solely on the permission slip written for them by Bush regime apparatchik John Yoo, a type of lawyer reminiscent of Third Reich lawyers who wrote the various genocidal Nazi laws and the legal "philosophy" that put an intellectual patina on Nazi ideology. Yoo has been rewarded for his Service To The Nation with a professorship at the University of California, Berkeley, Law School, an alleged bastion of liberalism. And by the way, "the" media has whitewashed most of the torture used. It was a lot more than waterboarding, as they are now presenting it, and the other "techniques" which they have tossed down the memory hole have been well documented.

Saying Haspel didn't torture anyone is like saying Adolf Hitler didn't kill any Jews. He didn't, actually. Not by his own hand, that we know of. Heinrich Himmler never tortured anyone either. In fact, the one time he ever witnessed people being executed, he vomited. Such a delicate soul.
The point is, it's completely disingenuous and dishonest for the CIA to deny Haspel's command responsibility for torture.

But no matter. As I expected, the U.S. Senate confirmed Haspel as the DCI, Director of Central Intelligence, chief of the CIA global Gestapo.

So the "glass ceiling" of secret police chief has finally yielded to a female. What a glad day.
Like the day a "black" man was elected president. You remember him. The guy who protected torturers, and imprisoned the only CIA officer who publicly denounced torture, John Kiriakou. The president who perfected the secret police total  surveillance state that the Bush regime began under the name "total information awareness." (A form of total population control.)

The "black" president who took Woodrow Wilson's Espionage Act and ran with it, going after all manner of whistleblowers and journalists. Oh, what a "historic" presidency that was! A real advance for "black people." (That's why blacks stopped being imprisoned in vastly disproportionate numbers, and police stopped murdering blacks. Oops, those things didn't happen. But blacks got richer under Obama. Oh wait, they got poorer. A LOT poorer, especially since his banker buddies scammed so many of them out of their homes with mortgage chicanery. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss...)

Before the whole sorry saga of the campaign to elevate Mistress of Torture Haspel is permanently consigned to the memory hole by the power establishment, let's take a stroll down memory lane and review some of the criminal media complicity with the CIA and its Torture Mistress. Come with me now back to the day Trump announced the nomination of Haspel to replace the loathsome billionaire Koch brothers toady Pompeo, who was picked to replace Rex Tillerson, unceremoniously bumped from his seat as Secretary of State by Trump, who announced his firing on Twitter without telling Tillerson, in order to publicly humiliate him.

 It was March 13, 2018.  At 8 am East Coast time, the alternative program Democracy Now!, a self-styled "progressive" show, came on the air and announced Trump's choice as new CIA director, and that she ran a CIA "black site" in Thailand where kidnapped prisoners were tortured and interrogated in secret.

Democracy Now! may have been aghast, but the reaction of the establishment media was celebratory. And they were apparently briefed in advance by the CIA on what line to push, unless they all just coincidentally think exactly alike.

For example, one of the main local New York City "news" radio stations, WCBS, a cog in the CBS/Viacom media empire, at 8:59 am hailed as historic the first woman to head the CIA. No mention of that key part of her resume, overseeing a secret torture prison and ordering the destruction of videotapes of the interrogations, evidence of her crimes.

Later that day, the U.S. government-created national radio "public" propaganda network, NPR, on their  4 PM "news" show, the propaganda reader Laksmi Singh falsely asserted that Haspel will likely face "tough questioning" over black sites at confirmation. Which was obvious bullshit, as turned out to be the case.

The British government's propaganda arm, the BBC, predictably made itself a handmaiden to the CIA propaganda campaign. The BBC "News"Hour show, that afternoon, promoted the "advance for women" line. As they so often do, they hauled on a U.S. imperialist apparatchik to spew propaganda without being challenged. This creep, a former chair of the House "intelligence" committee, a Congressional body under the control of the secret police, pushed the CIA line, asserting that Haspel "broke the glass ceiling."  He insisted that "no law was broken" by kidnapping, torture, and murder of prisoners. The mealy-mouthed Gestapo cheerleader gushed, "Not a blemish on her record to any degree...Trust me on this," she'll be great, he insisted.

In the ensuing months, establishment propaganda coverage continued to push the CIA's ersatz "feminism" line, minimized the torture (reducing it to just waterboarding) while usually substituting the aforementioned euphemisms for "torture," rarely mentioning the destruction of evidence (and never the deaths of prisoners in CIA captivity), and mostly focusing on wondering whether Haspel would be confirmed, making a drama out of what was really a foregone conclusion given the reactionary, imperialist majority in the Senate, all the while pretending that the Senate "confirmation process" isn't just a show, or that there was any doubt about her confirmation. There was a small moment of semi-drama when the dying Senator John McCain (he has an incurable brain cancer) urged his colleagues to reject Haspel. McCain was shot down while bombing northern Vietnam and tortured in captivity, which taught him that torture was evil. Unfortunately that's the only lesson he learned, as he is going to his death still a fanatical believer in U.S. imperialism, aggression, militarism, and war against small and weak targets. A Trump aide counseled that McCain could be ignored since he would be "dead soon." This comment was duly leaked and then ginned up into a political soap opera pseudo-scandal for days on end by the establishment media and Democratic Party hacks, who demanded an apology or even firing of the offender.

But I actually don't think Haspel is any more egregious as a CIA head than predecessors like Pompeo, or Hayden, or Panetta, or Tenet (who delivered "faulty," i.e. mendacious, "intelligence" to prompt the invasion of Iraq in 2003), or Colby (who before he was DCI headed the Phoenix torture and mass murder program in Vietnam, which created over 50,000 corpses), or Helms, responsible for the CIA coup in Chile in 1973, or the fascist Allen Dulles, who organized the assassination of president Kennedy in 1963 (after he was out of office, but not out of power) and innumerable other crimes.

The CIA is responsible for millions of deaths, most of which they instigated by getting fascist militaries and secret police agencies to kill people whose names were mostly supplied BY the CIA. In Indonesia in 1965 they instigated the murder of a million "communists" by the military, and greased the skids for the awful dictator Suharto to take power as a U.S. client.(The horrible propagandist Fareed Zakaria, is to this day pushing the CIA disinformation story that what happened in Indonesia was an attempted "Communist coup" that was thwarted by the Indonesian military, an absurd story on its face given the million unarmed civilians who were murdered.) Under Allen Dulles, there were the fascist coups in Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954) which destroyed democracies in those nations and ultimately resulted in a quarter million state murders in each of those countries. These "operations" were done on the orders of president Eisenhower, who most of the American left only remembers fondly for a couple of throwaway sentences in his farewell address of January 17, 1961, where he says "we must guard against the undue influence, whether sought or unsought, of the military industrial complex." The complex that HE did so much to build up! And MOST of the speech was devoted to defending that complex, and denouncing the Communist Menace. He also uttered the standard guff about the U.S.' "peaceful" intentions and methods! But apparently leftists so crave "respectability" that they'll seize on an establishment icon, even the man who ordered the two most notorious coups in CIA and U.S. history, to "legitimize" their criticisms of an evil, anti-human power structure they think can be talked into reforming itself! Good luck with that! (Most leftists are fatally compromised by their compromises with the system and collaboration with it. Oh, and there's money too, if you trim your political sails.)

And speaking of torture, the CIA has been torturing people since its inception, and training fascists around the world in torture. One of the reasons the CIA scientist Frank Olson was murdered by the CIA was his disillusionment with the agency after he discovered it ran a torture/murder center in West Germany, with "ex"-Nazis, to interrogate defectors from the Soviet bloc who were suspected of being enemy agents. [1] JFK created the so-called "Alliance of Progress," to counter the revolutionary influence of Fidel Castro and Cuba in Latin America. One of its branches was the diabolically misnamed "Office of Public Safety," which sent CIA torture tutors to train fascist secret policemen and military interrogators. One of these monsters was a guy named Dan Mitrione, sent down to Uruguay to do his evil work. According to former CIA officer John Stockwell, Mitrione would have a homeless person kidnapped to demonstrate torture techniques on for his "students," after which the victim would be murdered. Human life to these monsters has no more value than an insect's. But on the all too rare occasions when one of them gets what's coming to them, oh the HOWLS of outrage, and the bathetic beating of breasts in melodramatic media-ready grief! Mitrione was captured and ultimately put to death by the Tupumaro guerrilla group, a rare instance of justice in the U.S. empire. Mitrione is regarded as a heroic martyr by the CIA. (Reminds me of how the Nazis took the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the number two man in the S.S., a much more important cog in a machinery of evil than Mitrione was.)

So Gina Haspel will have to commit some much more major crimes to really make her bones. Torturing a few Muslim "terrorists" is small change in the annals of CIA crimes against humanity.

Does Secret Police Chief + Vagina = Feminism?

1]  There are a number of documentaries about the Frank Olson case. See for example "CIA Documentary - Biological Weapons & Experimentation on Humans (Frank Olson)."

BBC Rushes To Defend CIA Torturers- Again

The morally revolting things the BBC news does more than cancels out the interesting pieces they run. [1] 

They were at it again this morning. The occasion was the Senate “Intelligence Oversight” [sic] Committee finally getting up the backbone to release its own report on the CIA torture program. (Usually euphemized as “harsh interrogation program” allegedly to “protect us” from “terrorism.” There’s one way to get a scaredy-cat populace to endorse systematic government kidnapping and torture, in violation of treaty obligations and U.S. law.)

The BBC anchor said the report contained “details of harsh CIA interrogation” [hey BBC, can you pronounce “torture”?] during the “CIA’s campaign against Al-Qaeda.” At least, that was the excuse given. (Just keep in mind that it was secret police types who planted the explosives that blew up three (not two) buildings in lower Manhattan in 2001. [2]) (I didn’t catch the anchor’s name, but he’s a regular, a male with an African accent. There’s only one who hosts their overnight radio broadcast to the U.S.)

After this muddled intro, he brings on just ONE person- a “former CIA counterterrorism analyst.” (Rather like bringing on the axe-murderer’s lawyer to discuss the matter!) This man spouted such rhetoric as the “CIA’s sort of harsh methods,” (sort of harsh!) and “certain techniques” (unspecified) of the “enhanced interrogation program.”

The BBC man helpfully exclaimed that the report was old news, there wasn’t anything new about the [torture, the word they won’t say] in it. (In fact that was a flat lie, as the report DOES contain new details of the types and methods of torture.) The BBC creep also dismissed the whole thing as just “political.” “So what is the point of releasing this report? Is it political?” (Odd attitude for an alleged journalist! Who needs official records? Just keep everything secret! Is he angling for a job as CIA spokesman?) The CIA man happily agreed that the report is “a political football for those who have already made up their minds.” He also rebuked “the fecklessness of the Democratic Party who have tried to make the CIA a scapegoat.” “All of this was approved” by the White House, the lawyers [like John Yoo!], the CIA’s lawyers, he says. Well then no problem torturing people! Hey, your lawyers said it’s okay. (By the way, the Nazis had lawyers say the same thing about Hitler’s crimes. It means nothing.)

By the way, the report is 525 pages, but the BBC anchor already knows there’s nothing in it. No news here folks, move along!

Grotesque.

The BBC is acting as if it‘s a U.S. government propaganda agency. Oddly, even the U.S. government radio network NPR didn’t do that. The 12 noon (U.S. east coast time) NPR newscast called the report “scathing.”

Even secret police groupie and conduit for U.S. secret police propaganda Dina Temple-Raston, officially titled “NPR’s national security correspondent,” had to admit the report, even after CIA and Obama regime censorship, painted a pretty awful picture. Torture methods included days or weeks of sleep deprivation, and contrary to CIA lies, “Abu Ghraib-style” brutality, such as dragging their prisoners naked down hallways, Temple-Raston reports. But she made sure to end her brief news story with the CIA line that CIA says the report is all wrong. (The U.S. media has been parroting that CIA lie ad nauseam every time the story of the long-suppressed report has come up.)

Dina likes to imagine she's a secret agent. Exciting!

One thing the report asserts definitively is that NO plots were foiled by torture, Osama bin Laden WASN’T captured thanks to torture (a lie promoted by the movie Zero Dark Thirty, made with the help of illegally released “classified” info by the CIA and Obama White House), and in fact useful information was not obtained. The CIA of course contradicts all that- but they would, they’re the torturers. Oh, and they illegally broke into the computers of the Senate Committee staffers who were working on the report, a Federal felony (dozens in fact, the way the Federal government charges people) for which not only was no one prosecuted, but Eric “Due Process Means We Decide to Kill You” Holder, Jr., Obama’s Attorney General, refused to even investigate.

Obama and the CIA dug in their heels and resisted like mules the release of the report. Idiotically, the Senators let the CIA censor the report. And after months of Obama doing all he could to squelch the Senate report, his chief mouthpiece, Josh Earnest, had the nerve to say Obama very much wanted the report to be released.

Later the BBC World “Service” puts on “former” CIA dog Bob Baer, an arch reactionary who is one of the CIA’s public faces. Baer insists the only point of releasing the report is as a Democratic partisan attack on the Bush regime. Oh, and the details of torture “puts people’s lives at risk.” The old “sources and methods” mantra. Oh, and the Geneva Conventions are irrelevant because Al-Qaeda never signed them! (But the U.S. has, jackass. And anti-torture conventions too.) As for torturing innocent people, “that’s no different than the British police,” who arrest and release people. And he used “3,000” killed on 9/11 as justification. (Ironic, that, given the fact that most of them were killed because of the demolitions planted in advance by agents of the U.S. secret police deep state.)

Do they have Nazis on to discuss the Holocaust?

Hey, maybe next time there’s a U.S. torture scandal, ask a human rights lawyer! (This particular report, by Rebecca Kesby, did include a short description by a torture victim of what he suffered.)

NPR has a decent, succinct overview of the history of the development of the Senate "Intelligence" Committee torture report, which refutes the CIA’s and BBC’s bullshit, "Report Says CIA Misled Senate, White House On Interrogation Program," Dec. 9, 2014.

1] This is nothing new for the British government’s propaganda outfit. See for example “The BBC: Cover Up Central,” “Why Is The BBC Defending Chinese Computer Hacking?,” and “BBC, NPR Ignore Egyptian Seizure of Aljazeera Journalists.” for some absolutely breath-taking examples of egregious BBC propaganda that grossly distorts reality and covers the butts of some awful state criminals. (Which states might surprise you. In one case they hid Chinese computer hacking aimed at the U.S. Apparently their desire to suck up to the Chinese rulers so British capitalists could try to make a buck there outweighed even their slavish subservience to the U.S.A.!)

2] A thoroughly documented fact supported by over a thousand architects and engineers, plus demolitions experts. See for example “9/11: Explosive Evidence -- Experts Speak Out (Full)” and “9/11: Blueprint for Truth-The Architecture of Destruction-114min.”