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IPFS News Link • Politics: Democratic Campaigns

Ex-CIA Officer: The Dark Past Of Biden's Nominee For National Intelligence Director

• https://www.zerohedge.com, by John Kiriakou

The decision is a victory for the peace group Code Pink, which spearheaded the Stop Morell movement, and it's a great thing for all Americans.  Now, though, we have to turn our attention to Biden's nominee to be director of national intelligence (DNI), Avril Haines.

Haines is certainly qualified on paper to lead the Intelligence Community. A longtime Biden aide, she has the president-elect's confidence. But that's not good enough. Haines is exactly the kind of person who shouldn't be in a position of authority in intelligence. She is the kind of neoliberal intelligence apologist whom so many of us have opposed for so many years.  Don't just take my word for it, though.  Look at her record.

Haines first began working for Biden when she served as deputy general counsel of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when Biden was its chairman.  When Biden became vice president in 2009, Haines moved to the State Department, where she was the assistant legal adviser for treaty affairs.  After only a year, she moved to the White House, where she became deputy assistant to the president and deputy counsel to the president for national security affairs, the National Security Council's chief attorney.

That's quite a position. What it means was that her job was to legally justify President Barack Obama's decisions on such intelligence issues as drone strikes and whether to release the CIA Torture Report.  She served there under CIA Director John Brennan.  Obama apparently liked the job she did for him because in 2013, he named Haines deputy director of the CIA (DD/CIA).


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