Beautiful and glorious

The Senate confirms Gina Haspel to be CIA director. A fine day for that agency and our nation.

Wednesday roundup

Mark Theissen on Gina Haspel's spy chops:

It was one of the Clinton administration’s biggest counterterrorism successes. Just weeks after al-Qaeda terrorists trained by Iran blew up U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, Gina Haspel’s phone rang in the middle of the night. She was in her final weeks as station chief in what the CIA describes as an “exotic and tumultuous capital” in central Eurasia, and intelligence had just emerged that two senior al-Qaeda associates linked to the embassy bombings were on their way to the country where she was stationed.

Haspel swung into action, devising an operation to capture the terrorists. She worked around the clock, sleeping on the floor of her office, as agents tracked the terrorists to a local hotel, where the men were apprehended after a firefight. According to the CIA, “The successful operation not only led to the terrorists’ arrest and subsequent imprisonment, but to the seizure of computers that contained details of a terrorist plot.” For her efforts during the operation, which ultimately disrupted a terrorist cell, Haspel in 1999 received the George H.W. Bush Award for Excellence in Counterterrorism.

This is as much as the CIA has revealed, but according to press accounts, several senior al-Qaeda associates were captured in Baku, Azerbaijan, just weeks after the embassy bombings. They included Ihab Saqr , a top lieutenant of al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Essam Marzouk, who also worked for Zawahiri and had trained two of the embassy bombers. Mossad, Israel’s national intelligence agency, had reportedly intercepted signals indicating that Saqr was headed to Baku to meet an Iranian intelligence operative. 

And she gets big-time bipartisan kudos, Kamala Harris's moral preening notwithstanding:

“She has served in some really tough places, high-risk hardship posts, and has performed some extraordinary operations,” said former CIA official Henry “Hank” Crumpton, who was Haspel’s boss in the agency’s National Resources Division. According to a source familiar with her career, Haspel was once deployed in a conflict zone, when military officials from a hostile nation arrived without warning at an event she was attending. As she left, they fired at her vehicle, blowing out a tire. She still keeps the bullet as a reminder of the risks CIA officers take each day to protect the country. She knows their sacrifices firsthand. For her, some of the stars on the CIA’s Memorial Wall represent the names and faces of friends she has lost in the line of duty.

“She’s truly a spymaster,” said one retired senior intelligence official who knows Haspel well. “She’s managed intelligence operations against the hardest targets, Russia in particular. She has earned great respect from intelligence leaders around the world; even people like [Russian President Vladimir] Putin would have to respect her operational savvy.” Yet despite her many accomplishments, colleagues say, she is a paragon of humility with zero political ambition. “She’s never lobbied for a job,” one of her former CIA bosses told me . “The jobs searched for her.”

Little wonder that so many senior Obama-era intelligence officials — including Leon Panetta, John Brennan, Michael Morell, James R. Clapper Jr. and Jeremy Bash — have urged the Senate to confirm her. To vote down someone so obviously qualified as political retribution for the CIA’s now-defunct interrogation program would be a travesty. President Barack Obama’s Justice Department concluded that no crimes had been committed. Moreover, as CIA veterans point out, Brennan was himself deeply involved in the interrogation program, and was confirmed 63-34 as Obama’s CIA director, with only two Democrats and one independent voting against him. Why the double standard for the first woman nominated to lead the agency?

Excellent David Harsanyi piece at The Federalist entitled "The Barack Obama Legacy Deserves to Be Destroyed." 

More funny business from Salem Media:

It might not be unusual that a conservative-minded media organization would aim to support the Republican nominee. But the former host, Elisha Krauss, said she feels it's disingenuous to ostensibly hire hosts to be open about their views, only to pressure them behind the scenes to change. 

For months, Krauss said, Salem executives explicitly pressured her to change how she treated Trump. Though Krauss said she praised Trump when she felt he deserved it, it ultimately wasn't enough. In January 2017, Krauss said, she was shell-shocked when a casual meeting with a company executive turned into her dismissal. 

Krauss declined to discuss the details of her severance, but said the rest of her contract had been settled. 

The emails obtained by CNNMoney were sent in the summer of 2016 to Krauss and Ben Shapiro, both former co-hosts of KRLA's "The Morning Answer," and both conservative Trump critics. Krauss and Shapiro co-hosted the show along with Brian Whitman, an anti-Trump liberal, and later Jennifer Horn, a pro-Trump conservative. 

"What I have been hearing on TMA... has not been in the spirit of 'supporting the GOP nominee,'" one Salem executive, Terry Fahy, general manager at Salem, wrote in an email to Shapiro and Krauss on July 19, 2016. "In fact, it seems that the show gets into negative minutiae of the Trump campaign and the GOP convention (e.g. criticizing Trump for having his kids speak at the convention.) Do we really need a side by side audio comparison of Trump's wife's speech with Michelle Obama's? How is that ultimately relevant to the big picture and advance the cause?"

Eventually the axe fell:

 On a Sunday in January 2017, at a meeting she was told to bring her husband and child to, Krauss said a Salem executive told her she had just hosted her final show. She was not to communicate with anyone at the station or her listeners. She was done. Her listeners, she said, were told she was the one who decided to leave.

By the way, Conrad Black has a new book out that gushes all over his idol the Very Stable Genius, if you're into that sort of thing. Maybe Salem ought to talk to him about a show.


The NYT tries just a little too hard to spin Pompeo's absence for the big announcement:

On Tuesday, the Times breathlessly reported that Secretary of State Pompeo was absent from Washington when Trump announced he was pulling the U.S. out of the nuclear deal with Iran. “At a Key Moment, Trump’s Top Diplomat Is Again Thousands of Miles Away,” the headline harumphed. 

The Times reported that “senior State Department officials were momentarily speechless on Tuesday when asked why Mr. Pompeo did not delay his trip by a day to be in Washington during Mr. Trump’s Iran deal announcement.” According to the Times, European diplomats complained privately that they were “having trouble getting answers from Washington.” 

But the Times knew that Pompeo was heading to North Korea make sure that three Americans who had been jailed by the dictatorship would be coming home. It reported as much in this same story. And ultimately, Pompeo not only returned with the three prisoners, but also worked on arranging a date and location for Trump’s meeting with Kim Jong Un.

The guy had work to do.

In an ABC interview, Vice President Pence said that one of the detainees freed from North Korea asked to get out of the plane while it refueled in Anchorage to see the sunlight, which he hadn't seen in "a long time." 

Noam Chomsky is one warped dude:

During the question and answer session after his talk, Chomsky aimed his misguided philosophizing at Christianity, saying that the faith that isn't Islam has set out to threaten the globe. Campus Reform noted:

“People in high places now claim to be devout Christians, and on the basis of Christian ideals they’re saying let’s proceed to destroy the world,” Chomsky asserted, adding, “I don’t know anybody in the Islamic world that’s doing that.”

Where has he been? From everything I've seen, the regimes oppressing women, children, and gays aren't Christian. The nations that threaten modern democracy do not worship Jesus as Lord. The vast majority of acts of terrorism aren't committed by Baptists or Episcopalians either. There's a common thread through most of the violence in the world: radical Islam. 

Great Ben Shapiro piece at The Weekly Standard entitled "How Conservatives Can Win Back Young Americans."

 

 

Kamala Harris's vomit-inducing virtue signaling and where we are as a culture

Harris presses her line of inquiry, with the appropriate self-congratulatory, smug facial expression, during Gina Haspel's confirmation hearing:

Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) questioned CIA director nominee Gina Haspel's "suitability" to hold such a position on Wednesday.

Harris told Haspel during her Senate confirmation hearing that the selection of the CIA's new leader will be a "signal" to everyone around the world about American values.

She stated that Haspel had not answered if she believed previous interrogation techniques were immoral.

When Haspel did not answer the question multiple times, Harris grilled her further.

"Please answer yes or no. Do you believe in hindsight that those techniques were immoral," she said in the tense exchange. 

Haspel had tried to explain to Harris that the tools available at the time were fully employed at the Thailand site in question in order to keep thousands if not millions more Americans from dying in catastrophic attacks and Harris just kept harping on this personally-believe-it-was-moral angle.

The obvious answer is, of course it's moral. Unless you hate Western civilization, it's a no-brainer.

This analogy is by no means original, but anybody who had a modicum of love in his or her heart for his or her family would subject any fellow human being to excruciating torment if he or she thought it might prevent his or her child or spouse from getting killed by bad guys.

But such is the climate in post-America that Haspel couldn't just full-throatedly respond thusly.

Harris has pulled this kind of crud at a number of confirmation hearings. One notable recent example is asking Mike Pompeo about his views on homosexuality and "climate change" at his hearing to become Secretary of State.

 It's sick and ugly and harmful to the prospects for post-America's revival.

The narrow path through the Senate to Gina Haspel's confirmation

She's a great pick for CIA head. A careerist, at the agency since 1985, whose enthusiastic supporters range from Barack Obama to James Clapper to Donald Trump.

But Pubs will likely have to peel off some Dems to get her through. John McCain and Rand Paul, generally figures at odds with each other, are allies on the issue of enhanced interrogation. (Memo to senator McCain about the torture he endured in North Vietnam: You were a good guy. The jihadists waterboarded at the Thailand detention center were real bad guys.) A number of Dems in red states are up for reelection. Team Haspel had best be scheduling some visits to their offices.

China sees its relationship with us very differently than we do

At Red State, strieff has an eye-opening piece about a recent arrest of a former CIA agent:

 The Department of Justice has announced the arrest of a former CIA case officer on charges of “retaining classified information.”

Jerry Chun Shing Lee, aka Zhen Cheng Li, 53, a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer, was arrested last night on charges of unlawful retention of national defense information.

Dana J. Boente, Acting Assistant Attorney General for National Security and U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, and Andrew W. Vale, Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI’s Washington Field Office, made the announcement.

Lee was arrested after arriving at John F. Kennedy International Airport in Queens, New York.  Lee is a naturalized U.S. citizen, currently residing in Hong Kong, China.  According to court documents, Lee began working for the CIA as a case officer in 1994, maintained a Top Secret clearance and signed numerous non-disclosure agreements during his tenure at CIA.

According to court documents, in August 2012, Lee and his family left Hong Kong to return to the United States to live in northern Virginia. While traveling back to the United States, Lee and his family had hotel stays in Hawaii and Virginia.  During each of the hotel stays, FBI agents conducted court-authorized searches of Lee’s room and luggage, and found that Lee was in unauthorized possession of materials relating to the national defense.  Specifically, agents found two small books containing handwritten notes that contained classified information, including but not limited to, true names and phone numbers of assets and covert CIA employees, operational notes from asset meetings, operational meeting locations and locations of covert facilities.

He's been looked at as a possible mole in the context of the Chinese government rolling up informant networks in recent years.

Strieff quotes his own earlier post about this:

As I said in an earlier post on another CIA operative arrested for spying for the Chinese:

The Chinese are actively targeting US industry, military, academia, and government officials. In March, a State Department official was charged with working for the Chinese. While they are recruiting here, they are actively engaged in rolling up networks it took us decades to establish in China.

We also have national blinders about China, perhaps because we have a major trade relationship with them and because they aren’t as blatantly aggressive as Putin’s Russia. While people are turning white trousers brown over the DNC losing some emails, no one really gives a rat’s ass about the fact that the Chinese government hacked the US Office of Personnel Management and downloaded more that 20 MILLION personnel records of current and former government employees.

This story caught my eye because I'm currently working on a story for a business magazine in a midwestern city in which there are a number of companies with global reach. Yesterday I interviewed  a person whose day job is with an international investment firm. She also serves on the city's economic development board. The story is actually about communication technology, and she revealed the frustrations she and colleagues feel when they encounter the ways the Chinese government blocks their ability to communicate. In the course of our conversation, I asked her if there were truly private companies in China. She said that there were, and the advantages of working with them was their flexibility, but that state-owned enterprises had the real money, so that they had to be dealt with as well.

As I say, my article is going to be about the bells and whistles of modern communication in global business, but a few years ago, for the same magazine, I did a piece - it was an idea I'd pitched to the editor, rather than an assignment from him, which is usually the case - on the pros and cons - not just economic, but those of a national-security nature - of fostering trade with China. I was disappointed in the way the piece turned out. I couldn't get anybody to talk to me about the obvious agenda of the Chinese government. It's clear that the government - that is, the Party - intends to overtake the United States economically, in military strength and geostrategically.

The tone of the responses I got to my attempts to broach the subject was along the lines of, "You know how big that market is, how many people and how much capital is there. Someone is going to act on that opportunity. Why shouldn't it be us?"

Well, as long as it doesn't abet the Chinese government's aims, I guess they should go for it. But how sure are they that their activities are immune to that?