President Trump's surprise move to make major changes in his Administration brings forth nominees for CIA director and Secretary of State that have been deeply involved and/or supportive of President Bush's torture program. Should they be confirmed...or in jail?
President Trump's surprise move to make major changes in his Administration brings forth nominees for CIA director and Secretary of State that have been deeply involved and/or supportive of President Bush's torture program. Should they be confirmed...or in jail?
President Trump's surprise move to make major changes in his Administration brings forth nominees for CIA director and Secretary of State that have been deeply involved and/or supportive of President Bush's torture program. Should they be confirmed...or in jail?
And I wish they were doing better, but they're shifting things around.
It looks like we'll be getting a new Secretary of State and a new CIA director.
Not exactly new.
They've been around.
We know a little bit about who will become the Secretary of State if approved by the Senate, as well as the CIA director.
But there's nothing to cheer about.
I think it's a big, bold step in the wrong direction.
I think it's a sign of bad things coming.
I cannot see how a libertarian or a constitutionalist could support these moves and these people moving into this category.
And yet we have a Republican, conservative administration in many ways cheering it on.
You know, the foreign policy, some of the things have been, you know, the wars and things have been bipartisan.
But this hope there's a coalition to reassess this whole thing about who's going to be the director of the CIA as well as the DOD or the Secretary of Defense State, Secretary of State.
So we will see this.
And I think we're moving in the wrong directions, but it looks like the administration is coming together and is sort of following a pattern and it's not getting better because Tillerson was not our guy and he was all over the place.
But at least he came across with maybe a little bit of a calming type common sense and he had a slightly better position.
But for them to demonize him now and throw him out and then put in Pompeo, you know, Secretary of State, this is scary stuff.
And then when you look at the CIA, I don't think it's much of a victory for America.
I don't think it's a victory for civil liberties.
I don't think it's a victory for our Constitution.
I think it's a big, big setback for the hopes that we've all had for coming up with a common sense approach to foreign policy.
Certainly in Pompeo, who we've known about, you know, we have a quote that we'll pull up, but while we're pulling it up, here's a couple of things about him.
This is our chief diplomat now, or Wilby, supports NSA bulk collection on Americans, opposed shutting down Guantanamo, defended the CIA after the Senate torture report came out.
He said, these men and women are heroes, the torturers named in the report, adamantly opposed to the Iran deal.
And I think we have a quote about bulk collection.
Adamantly opposed to the Iran deal.
He said, Iran, the world's largest sponsor of terrorism, which is just a lie.
It's absolutely not true.
And here's what he said about spying on us.
Congress should pass a law reestablishing 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.
This is not a friend of liberty, Dr. Paul.
If that isn't enough to alert the American people, they either have their head in the sand, they don't care, or they endorse this stuff.
And it's probably a mixture of things, but much of it is probably apathy.
Too many people don't care, and they just let this go.
But there'll be people cheering this on, or it wouldn't have happened already.
And Trump wouldn't be president if people didn't cheer this on.
Because as the clip that we had there, this is not brand new.
They didn't sneak this in.
They've had this position.
Pompeo, you know, this was discussed a bit when he was up for CIA director and it was mentioned.
And yet they go along with it.
Right now, the question is, for less than principled reasons, there could be a coalition building to have some opposition to these two appointments.
Let's hope so.
Anything that would delay it and let people think about that, the better it is.
So right now, it would be much, much better to have delay and none of these conversations going on, which are always going against celebrity.
Why would we take a guy that makes a quote like that, which is absolutely, you know, anathema to what Americans should believe in, to the Constitution and working toward peace and what we're supposed to be all about.
And then when you talk about torture and they brag about it and think this is a solution, and then they come up and say, torture is supposed to make America great again.
Sure, sure.
I think what it does, it dehumanizes a nation as well as the people who perpetuate the torture.
And yet there's not too much opposition to it.
But I just hope there could be a coalition built here in the next few weeks to oppose these appointments.
We've had a chance.
We know more about it.
And the whole thing is, if we do get support for this position, we'll take it.
But it's usually just partisan politics.
Oh, you know, if the Democrats are in office, who knows?
I mean, some of this stuff that went on, you know, when Hillary was there and others, they were doing the same thing.
So it isn't that.
But if it's partisan politics and they stumble on to doing something right by maybe, you know, holding back on these appointments, I think that would be good.
Well, we were both feeling a little morose this morning as we were researching this, but we brightened up a little bit because we saw a quote that appealed to us, and we hope that about 50 other senators make the same quote.
The quote is, I will oppose the nominations and do everything I can to block them.
That's a senator from Kentucky by the name of Paul.
He's vowed to, he opposed Pompeo the first time.
He's vowed to oppose both Pompeo and Gina Haspel, who's up for CIA.
And if you look at the math, it's kind of interesting.
It's maybe a bit fanciful, but the Republicans are 11 to 10 on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
And so if Paul opposes, he's a key vote.
He'll throw it into a tie and force Senator Corker to break the tie and send it to the full Senate on essentially a tie.
If he votes no, if Senator Paul follows what he says and votes no in the full Senate, we know that Senator McCain is out of the picture.
He hasn't voted in months due to his cancer.
And all the Democrats vote no and oppose him on principle and policy or whatever it is, politics probably.
Then the Republicans are left 49 to 50 and the two nominees are defeated.
That would be fast.
Obviously, it's not going to happen because of hawkish gems.
But it's interesting to look at the numbers.
Yeah, and I think if you look at what's happening in this transition going on and a shift, to me it looks like all the ducks are being lined up in a row here.
I think the most immediate effect is going to be with Iran.
You know, that treaty or agreement that we have and that backing off from this nuclearization of Iran, I think that'll end.
I think we'll get out of that.
And I don't think the Europeans will stand up to us and just go ahead and say, all right, you guys leave, but we're still going to work with Iran.
They could do that.
And they've hinted that they might, but I don't think they will.
I think we're still intimidating and powerful.
We still have money in the Federal Reserve.
We don't have any money in the bank.
And we still have a lot of weaponry, so they're intimidated.
But I think that is one of the most immediate ramifications of what's going on right now is a shift in attitude.
And, you know, Trump has been sort of delaying this whole thing about sanctions, you know, whether it would be a lot worse and give them a waiver.
But there's another date coming up, I think, in May to make another major decision on that.
It would be hard to imagine if we have a Secretary of State Pompeo, CIA Director Haspel, with the others in the administration who are also virulently anti-Iran.
It would be hard to imagine that this May deadline will pass without the U.S. imposing the additional sanctions that have been waived.
And it is interesting that you say you think the Europeans will go along with the U.S. You're probably right.
But in that case, I think it actually drives us a lot closer to war because I think it also drives Iran closer into the arms of Russia, closer into the arms of Russia, China, whoever else, a coalition against the U.S., against the U.S. and its European allies.
It just really polarizes the world a lot more, and it'll show the Europeans to be the slaves they are to U.S. foreign policy, where they're going to mess over their own citizens who are making money and doing business with Iran.
Doesn't matter, we'll do what Washington says.
Yeah, and then when we think about who's coming into the CIA, we can hardly be very optimistic about that.
And I mentioned to you earlier, I say when you put Haspel in together with Haley, we have two dominant women that are involved, and I certainly am not opposed to women, but I'm opposed to authoritarian women who like to use force and show how tough they are and see if they can be meaner and nastier than the men are.
And there's two of them that will try very hard to do that.
Yeah, it really shows how far we've fallen.
And Ed Snowden, who now is probably a little more worried because Pompeo wants his head on a platter, but he pointed out that Gina Haspel may actually have a difficult time traveling to Europe to meet her colleagues because there was a complaint written by the European Center for Constitutional Human Rights to Germany's federal prosecutor demanding the prosecution of Haspel for the torture that she personally participated in of at least two individuals.
So we have a CIA director can't leave the country because she's considered a possible war criminal.
Is that not embarrassing?
Oh, it can't be much worse.
You know, dealing with North Korea becomes a little bit more complex because we were hopeful that some good would come from it.
But now it's a mixed bag.
You don't know which direction to go because Trump goes in different directions at different times.
But I don't see anybody that's moving up on the ladder here that would bring about some common sense into negotiations with North Korea.
I think they're every bit as hawkish as Trump was in all his expressions of how bad North Korea was.
So I don't see any positive coming from that, even though it should occur.
But what do you think the odds might be of somebody putting a monkey wrench in it and maybe even slowing the little bit of effort they've made?
I mean, that's a possibility, I guess.
I think it definitely is.
I think when Pompeo opens the door, a bunch of neocons follow him into the State Department, and they're not going to stand by and watch Trump have a personal diplomacy with Kim and try to ratchet it down.
I think we may even see this meeting canceled.
Maybe there'll be a provocation or some stage event that will allow them to cancel it.
You know, we worry a lot about the potential wars with Iran and what's going on in the Middle East and what could happen in Korea.
But not many people are expressing their concern about the potential of an outright trade war going on.
Markets are a little shaky, and I don't think they are totally satisfied that it won't occur.
But I think what they're talking about, since they want to be more aggressive against China and more aggressive with Iran and the use of sanctions, I think the odds of a hot Cold War with a trade war is much greater now.
And that could have a great deal of economic significance if that happens, along with all this militarism that's going on.
Trade wars often lead to real wars.
Yeah, that's right.
Trade Wars and Economic Significance00:11:19
But going back to Haspel a little bit, I think we really should spell it out, even as unpleasant as it is, because she directly oversaw the two psychologists that we've talked about on this show who were involved, really a disgrace to their profession, involved in creating new torture techniques.
She personally oversaw them, and she personally oversaw the torture.
And one of the gentlemen, Abu Zabadai, was tortured so badly that they said he appeared dead.
And this is what she had to have known about this.
She was there at a secret prison in Thailand.
Here's what they subjected him to.
Forced nudity, sleep deprivation, confinement in small dark boxes, deprivation of solid foods, stress positions, physical assaults where they whacked his head against the wall, temperature extremes, sexual humiliation, and 83 waterboarding episodes.
This is one month.
In one month.
That's three times a day.
Three times a day.
When the doctor's orders that, they call it TID, waterboard them, three times a day.
And that's essentially what they were doing.
Now, she committed two major crimes.
The first crime was, you know, there are laws against torture, you know, international laws, which you could say this is illegal.
It's certainly immoral.
It never produces anything, no matter what they argue.
It's a total negative.
But then when they were caught at it, then she destroyed the information.
They're never punished for this.
The legal authorities, whether the Justice Department or whatever, nobody ever gets punished.
And I think the worst part is that afterwards, they actually admitted that they never got any positive information.
They say, yeah, but torture is good.
You can get information.
The one question that they would never answer is this soon they have 100 people and they know or they suspect that there's one individual there that might give out the information.
And are they going to torture all 100?
Oh, yeah, well, that's the price they have to pay.
But then when you get down to it, the people who are being tortured, they do so long they don't even know what's going on.
Their minds are practically destroyed.
And they'll do anything or say anything to try to get them to quit.
But I think the main problem is not so much that torturing and the death penalty, some of these individuals deserve it, but we're not in the business of only meeting out vengeance.
But I always think about the people who do it, the countries that endorse it.
That is so dehumanizing.
And no proof that we're going to save the world by going along with that.
But the people who participate in that, that literally do this torturing, how does a person or a woman now, a man or woman now, participate that and torture a guy like this and rationalize and say, well, he deserved it, he deserved it.
And then never prove that he had an ounce of information that was helpful.
Yeah, the person must be a psychopath to do that.
But here's the thing we talk a lot about separation of powers.
This is Haspel's name was on the order.
She signed the order ordering the destruction of 92 videotapes of the torture that they did.
And she did it because she didn't want any overseers to see it.
She didn't want Congress to see it.
She didn't want the legislative branch to see it.
The people that have a constitutional obligation to conduct oversight.
This is the woman who will brief the president daily on world affairs.
Should we sleep safer because of that?
So you've just described what kind of activities you need to perform when you're in the U.S. government or in the CIA to get a promotion.
Pay raise and a promotion.
And a lot of people have already testified how good a person she was and efficient and all these things.
And they totally ignored this.
That's why we're on a bad course.
Our country's respect for liberty and concern for humanity and the willingness to do these things.
And it is.
It's a war.
It's a war, physical war.
It's a trade war, but it's a war against American liberty.
And this is just an insult for us to assume that this is what is necessary to make America great.
Well, for some reason, I don't buy into that.
My problem I have personally is that sometimes when the two parties are fighting with each other, you know, I sort of think that, well, Trump's doing this.
I sort of have sympathy because I don't want the gloating of the opposition, you know, and the victories that they would claim.
But we have just put up with way too much.
I don't know why the people tolerate this, but I think this is a very, very bad sign of what's going on.
And the American people, if they want to live in a country that has respect for liberty, instead of punishing and threatening death penalties to somebody who's telling us the truth, here we have people who tell the lies and we promote them.
And the other people who tell the truth, like Ed Snowden, and we have people in the administration that people were talking about saying, well, he deserves a death penalty.
I mean, what is, I just, you can't understand how they can go along with this and where their thoughts are, because they are what we call pro-war, and it's pro-war against liberty and the American people and humanity.
And it doesn't need to be, none of this need to be necessary.
You say, well, what about in circumstances where it looks like it's really necessary we torture this guy?
Well, why are we there in the first place?
Why have we gone 6,000 miles away, invade these countries, and tell them that we have to remake your country and get involved?
So getting involved in this mess, there shouldn't be a Guantanamo and these secret prisons and torturing because that's all a consequence of bad policy.
Bad policies which are illegal, immoral, unconstitutional, and one step leads to another.
You do one harm.
You know, in economics, you do one thing wrong.
It requires two more regulations to correct it.
In foreign policies, that's way.
When you make a mistake, it requires more piling on.
And just look at the Middle East, how that whole system keeps spreading and spreading.
And that's what's been happening here.
And now I think we're compounding this with the appointments on this administration.
But then people say, yeah, but do you think Hillary would have done any better?
And the answer is no, no.
Our efforts are to change people's mind in a more inclusive way, in a bipartisan way, because right now, the bipartisanship on issues like this is too strong.
That is the problem.
Sides endorse that because we we didn't have saints running the in the last administration.
They weren't running the show in a moral sense.
I mean, we had the wars and the killing and all the things going on.
So this is a.
This is an issue which is a much higher order and it has to do with the morality of the people, and the founders warned us, this system can't work if the morality of the people break down, and I guess people could look around and look at what's happening on our university campuses and Cultural Marxism and all the nonsense going on there some people could make.
And I'm very sympathetic to the idea that the moral, the immorality of the nation has a lot to do with what's happening in our government and our government that we're complaining about.
I think we're complaining about the symptoms of something much deeper and broader, about what's happening to our culture.
Yeah, absolutely well, I would just close by saying I think this is potentially a watershed event, but it's important for the American people to focus Democrats out there, progressives out there.
If you oppose President Trump, you have the opportunity, you have the possibility of convincing your Democratic senators to hold the line to oppose these nominations and if these two people get through, it'll be because of Democrats.
Democrats will have enabled this Republican president they claim to despise so much will have enabled two of the probably the worst choices in history for an administration of Republicans libertarians, conservatives you also claim to care about our civil liberties many of you, it's.
You must try to peel away some Republican senators to vote against this.
This actually is a battle that can be won and it will send a powerful message to the administration that we don't want to go in this direction.
Daniel, all I can say is, very well said, very good, because that certainly is the message that needs to be heard, and even though a moment ago I talked about the morality of a nation, which might be the overriding issue, I've been involved in politics and try to use the political system as a method of expressing ourselves, and fortunately we still have this opportunity.
I've been able to, over several decades, talk about issues that I thought were important and people did pay attention, even though we were in a minority, but whether it had to do with sound economic policy and monetary policy and a different foreign policy, the political process is a useful tool.
Hopefully we can use it to persuade and they change the law, but in the meantime it should be used to call attention to the American people.
And this is an opportunity as much as anything, because if the people wake up and realize what's happening and next year, you know, things don't get any better they might think about, well, how do we change it?
And when people say want to throw up their hands, how do we do it?
How do we do it?
I keep saying well, why don't we just start with a very simple trick, have people and go to Washington who take their oath of office seriously and start obeying the Constitution?
Not perfect, but it would certainly be a step in the right direction.
And I think, with that effort and we have to always remember that you don't have to wait and be despondent, because 51% of the people don't agree with that.
Ideas are important.
You get 8-10% of the people agreeing on certain issues and you can persuade the rest and that is what's happening now.
The maverick people in this country don't, they would agree with us I believe and yet the propagandists, the people in the media and the noise you hear, they're in charge and that is why the ideas are important and ideas have influence and an idea whose time has come can certainly make a difference and we have the vehicles.
Even before the internet, ideas were important because by word of mouth and pamphleteering it did change things and it certainly changed our early history and that is the way it operated.
So we need to be concise and understand the philosophy that we're promoting and we can make a difference.
And I want to thank you for joining us and being with us on Ron Paul Liberty Report.