Haspel
With respect to Ms. Haspel’s nomination, I’ve been on a merry-go-round ride with this. My initial reaction to her nomination was positive (and I was a bit surprised at the administration’s apparent clear-thinking on the nomination). Like all Americans, I have a stake in the success of the men and women of the CIA to perform their various missions under leadership that never wavers from the overarching goal of protecting us from those bad actors who are working every day to harm us. A 30-year CIA veteran with Ms. Haspel’s resume would, in principle, be a big plus to the CIA, our domestic intelligence community (IC) and our allied intelligence services.
My own experience in that kind of work is limited to knowing well one man, my father, who, along with his other public duties as a uniformed officer in the United States Air Force, was also trained in some level of spycraft. He exercised that training for much of his active-duty career. During the height of the Cold War, he commanded a unit of airmen—pilots and crews flying intelligence-gathering missions—whose clandestine flights more than once resulted in rarely-disclosed deaths. He also had an unspecified (to this date) role in intelligence collection during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. His interface with the CIA was never fully revealed to me, even as he neared his death and I had my own security clearances that gave me access to many interesting things. Whenever I would probe a bit deeper into his generalized narrative about his work, he would usually give me his wry smile and change the subject. Much of what he did, saw, and commanded went with him to Arlington National Cemetery in 2003.
Perhaps it is the wishful thinking of a faithful son, but I believe my father never would have countenanced torture—in any form—as an intelligence gathering method. He had a fine moral compass that I know pointed unwaveringly to a place far beyond his West Point motto of “Duty, Honor, Country.” Army Field Manual or not, I don’t believe there was any language written by man—under any government-crafted, judicially-sanctioned disguise of legality—that would have moved my dad’s moral needle away from that ever-present lodestone of conscience. Yes, he took human life when he was a fighter pilot in World War II; yes, he was prepared to do so again during the Cold War had that been necessary. But, given the chance to put a prisoner of war on a slanted table, cover his mouth with a towel, and pour buckets of water into his face to simulate the onset of death, would he have done that? No. Nor could he have been a part of a chain of command that permitted such torture. I knew my dad; he would speak conviction to power and be fully prepared to walk away from his national service.
So we come back to Ms. Haspel. During the public portion of her Senate hearing, I wanted to hear her take a strong moral stand against torture, and to acknowledge the immorality of what she oversaw in Thailand in the early 2000s. In her Senate testimony she said, “My moral compass is strong. I would not allow C.I.A. to undertake activity that I thought was immoral, even if it was technically legal. I would absolutely not permit it.”
Haspel said leadership is about learning and growing with new understanding. I would remind her leadership is also about setting an unshakeable, unequivocal moral standard when it comes to refusing to cruelly manipulate the lives of others—enemies or not.
Perhaps that moral standard is, as she intimated, within her and somehow inexpressible in public—I’d like to give her the benefit of a doubt because she is eminently qualified for the job. But I can’t. Morality is not nuanced; it is not about convenient equivocation or parsing context in front of the cameras. It is a driving force—neither secular nor religious—that supplies the actionable blueprint for a compassionate, humane, civilization or society. Without that blueprint, any other plan to move humanity from the mud to the stars is bound to fail.
Kelly
Now, concerning John Kelly’s unfortunate remarks about immigrants and their shortcomings as productive members of our society. Many more eloquent voices have already pitched in on this, including my friend and Washington Post columnist, Karen Tumulty whose column noted the ironic history of John Kelly’s Irish heritage and the rise of the “No Nothing Party.” Tumulty wrote, in part, “
“It would be disturbing to hear any person in a position of trust express such lack of regard for the fundamental values that have made this country what it is. But in Kelly’s case, it was particularly egregious because … well, because his name is Kelly.
His ancestors came from Ireland, as mine did. He grew up on Bigelow Street in the Brighton neighborhood of Boston, where reminders of his heritage — and of the opportunities made possible by his immigrant forebears — would have been everywhere he looked.” Karen closes with this: “There are still Know-Nothings among us. They are the people who forget their own history.”
I cannot do better than Karen in expressing my disappointment at John Kelly’s sudden myopia when it comes to looking toward the potential of the immigrants and their children who are coming here not to take advantage indiscriminately and selfishly of America’s largess, but who are here to open doors to education for themselves and their children. They want nothing more than to step across the thresholds of new job opportunities—low paying as they might be—and to one day be able to try to achieve something better in a country where striving for something better defines our nation’s existence!
It is a cliché to fall back on the “Plant a tree not to give shade to yourself, but to give shade to your children and your children’s children.” But the truth of the matter is, when Americans open the door to those for whom all doors have been bolted shut by despots, gangs, kidnapping, murder, and failing economies, we open the doors to untapped opportunities for the next generation of immigrants whose heritages enrich us all. John Kelly doesn’t seem to want to plant a single tree…and that’s unfortunate and shortsighted.
Nielsen
Finally, a brief note on Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, who took a bit of a hit the other day when president Trump singled her out for a public flogging in front of her peers, and, ultimately, the country. I don’t know all the dynamics, or all the facts—that’s my full disclosure. I can say I’m not a big fan of anyone who supports separating children from their families at the border, so I’m not giving Ms. Nielsen any sort of pass. What I do sense is that Secretary Nielsen was targeted by the Great Bully in a way that was meant to demean and embarrass. That the Great Bully did that is no surprise—it is his modus operandi, and we seem to have become inured to it, no matter who the target is. And that’s the problem, folks.
We are normalizing our personal and national reaction to the bullying violence to which the men and women in Trump’s sphere are routinely subjected. Trump’s method of berating, gas-lighting, and spewing innuendo until the target gives in or gives up is not now, nor has it ever been, what we should accept as normal. Ever. The consequence of accepting bullying as a normal way of forcing people to act the way the bully wants them to act is that it inures—numbs may be a better word--witnesses and passersby from taking a stand against the bully when things get really get bad. Eventually, people begin walking past the scene of the crime with nary a peep of objection or outrage. When that happens, bullying victims begin to believe they have no where to turn for help and comfort and options. A bullying victim without any peer or advocacy support—or other non-judgmental options—has little recourse, and quiet desperation becomes his or her norm.
I don’t know Ms. Nielsen, beyond news profiles and seeing her at Congressional hearings and during the occasional cable news interviews. But I do know bullies and their victims—my own story of being a victim has been well told. When I read what Mr. Trump did to her, I wanted to call her, to tell her to stand up, tell the president he had no right to speak to her like that, and walk out and not look back. That would have been one powerful message (if only I had her number).
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