Legendarily dickish former spook MIchael Hayden is back in the news.He’s been known to insult people and he’s at it again:
Who gets “emotional” about torture—or, rather, what is the proper emotional response to a history of torture and lies? On Fox News, on Sunday morning, Chris Wallace asked Michael Hayden, the former director of the C.I.A., about a report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, sixty-three hundred pages long, that “says the C.I.A. misled the public about the severity and the success of the enhanced interrogation program.” Hayden’s first response was to talk about the feelings of Dianne Feinstein, the chair of the committee, citing an article by David Ignatius: “He said Senator Feinstein wanted a report so scathing that it would ‘ensure that an un-American brutal program of detention and interrogation would never again be considered or permitted.’
“Now, that sentence, that motivation for the report, Chris, may show deep emotional feeling on part of the senator. But I don’t think it leads you to an objective report.
What’s fascinating to me about the stand-off between Senator Feinstein and the CIA is that it is the latter who are “emotional,” and, I daresay, hysterical, about the subject of torture and keep making things worse for themselves. Old school spymasters like Allen Dulles and Richard Helms were known for their tact and discretion as opposed to the Hayden-Brennan school that keeps calling out members of the intelligence committee including its chair. It’s an indication of the arrogance of the CIA and how much power they gained in the Bush-Cheney years.The pre-Church committee CIA was just as arrogant but at least they had better manners…
Back to Hayden’s imbecilic, sexist comment. As far as I can tell, having a vagina doesn’t make one more emotional than having testicles. Besides, Michael Hayden is an emotional motherfucker who puts the testy in testicles…
In other intelligence committee related news, I have a new hero. It is the mustachioed Independent Senator from Maine ,Angus King. I’ve never had a hero named Angus; probably because it’s evocative of haggis and bagpipe music. Anyway, Senator King was on Up with Steve Kornackiand went after torture aficionado, Dick Cheney:
“If he doesn’t think that was torture,” he said, “I would invite him anywhere in the United States to sit in a waterboard and go through what those people went through.”
“That’s ridiculous to make that claim,” King went on. “This was torture by anybody’s definition.” Even John McCain agrees it was torture, he added, “and I think he’s in a better position to know that than Vice President Cheney.”
“What they did was bad, but then to misrepresent it the way they did throughout a number of years — that’s what’s really the worse thing.”
As we all know Cheney has always lacked the courage of his convictions. He was a rabid hawk during the Vietnam era but dodged the draft and then bragged about it. His Dickness is the ultimate chicken hawk and would rather shit in his pants on Meet The Press before being waterboarded. Now that I think of it, *that’s* something I’d like to see and David Gregory deserves to experience.
That is all.
What words do you use for someone who learning of torture doesn’t effect their emotions? And again, no effect when they learn that they are the ones who facilitated it?
Barry Crimmins’ watchword: Never shake hands with a war criminal.
We always knew Hayden was an asshole. But, I think we can now put him on the war criminal list, too.
The gun nut I know used a similar argument after the Sandy Hook shootings. He kept saying that it would be unwise to pass laws restricting gun ownership based on “emotional reaction” to the killing of elementary school children and their teachers. He said that all those emotions would cloud the ability of legislators to perform rationally. I don’t know how he feels about torture; I kinda gave up on him after that.