Opinion

Robert Steele: Gina Haspel’s Confirmation Challenge

Gina Haspel, the first female nominee to be director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is going to face some very tough questions in her confirmation hearing.

She has my support on  five conditions:

01 She acknowledges the moral and practical errors of the past, inclusive of the rendition & torture program and the drone assassination program;

02 She acknowledges that much of what CIA does is not worth the money we pay for it, and CIA is severely deficient by virtue of its providing, “at best,” 4% of what the President or a major national security leader needs (and nothing for everyone else). She outlines a path toward fixing all of these shortfalls.

03 She explicitly repudiates the asinine unconstitutional pathological idea of privatizing covert and clandestine operations.

04 She points out that “central” intelligence is an oxymoron in our present state where, for example, NSA processes 1% of what it collects and does not provide meaningful persistent signals intelligence support to military operations abroad, clandestine operations, or counterintelligence operations.

05 She agrees to support the Open Source Agency as a Presidential Initiative to be resident within the Executive Office of the President (EOP), while she takes on the task of consolidating the 30% of the entire secret world that is useful in an expanded Classified Intelligence Agency (CIA).