Gina Haspel’s Nomination for the CIA is About More Than Gina Haspel

I am sick of people with no military experience expressing outrage over real or alleged torture tactics, like waterboarding, against open killers who seek to obliterate freedom, liberty and individual rights.

Because that’s what we’re talking about here: Killers. Enemy combatants in a war, a war never declared by the United States, but relentlessly executed against the United States at least since 1979, the year the current Iranian regime (the world’s chief sponsor of terrorism) came to power.

The “correct” position, it seems, goes like this:

Tough interrogation techniques, no matter what the circumstance, are automatically and always wrong.

Interrogation techniques are automatically and always to be called torture, with no precise, objective definition of “torture” ever required or permitted.

Gina Haspel, President Trump’s nominee to head the CIA, will not take this position. That makes her bad, and wrong. Being seen as opposing her makes you good, virtuous and right.

Opposing Haspel provides an opportunity for people who know nothing whatsoever about the military, and who appear to have no grasp about the nature of evil, to preen before the media or their friends and say, “Look at me. I’m morally superior. I don’t like to torture people.”

It’s just one of the many things I am sick of, more sick and tired than I can say.

I am not in a position to know what it takes to be a good director of the CIA, because I have never worked in that field. But what I do know, for certain, is that the leader of such an organization must be prepared to do what it takes to defend America at any cost. Because if we lose America, we lose the last best hope of earth, the only shelter for the remnants of individual rights and rational human liberties left on the planet.

The people who claim to love human life and therefore oppose tough interrogation techniques never offer an alternative to preserving the “democracy” and freedom they otherwise claim to love. So how are we to protect our rights from people seeking to literally and figuratively blow us up? No alternative is provided. They proudly offer their ignorance, their inexperience with military or CIA matters, and their alleged moral superiority as all the justification they need.

This is the kind of sneering, stupid, pretentious and ignorant mentality that got President Trump elected. One of the reasons I voted for Donald Trump was his defense of the principle of doing what it takes — not without boundaries, but when the situation called for it — to keep America’s fragile and imperiled system of individual rights intact.

It’s fine to oppose Gina Haspel for the CIA if you know what you’re talking about, and if you can prove you have a better alternative. But at the end of the day, Donald Trump is the President, and the same people who would not have permitted questioning any of Barack Obama’s choices without being called a “racist” are now prepared to vote down President Trump’s choice — with no justification required.

If you don’t want our military and intelligence officers to have any leeway in apprehending and questioning open enemies of America and of man’s rights, then I challenge you to offer a a rational alternative. And I don’t mean Obama’s legacy, which brought us only more and more terrorism. Until or unless you do offer an alternative, I’m inclined to view you — as I viewed Obama — as actually on the other side.