Bernie backs Biden's cabinet picks for warmongers and torture apologists
“Working within the context of what Biden wants” apparently also extends to other areas - such as supporting warmongers & torture apologists.
On the same day Joe Biden spoke at his inauguration about “restoring the soul of our nation” and social media buzzed with memes about the mittens Bernie Sanders decided to wear while in attendance, drone warrior and torture apologist Avril Haines was also confirmed as Biden’s pick for Director of National Intelligence. The vote was overwhelmingly in her favor and even included the support of Bernie Sanders.
Haines worked as a legal adviser to the Bush administration in 2003 - the same year the US invaded Iraq over nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. Starting in 2010, she was an Obama lawyer on the National Security Council where - as reported by Newsweek - “Haines was sometimes summoned in the middle of the night to weigh in on whether a suspected terrorist could be lawfully incinerated by a drone strike.”
In 2013, she was tapped as Obama’s Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, where she was in charge of determining the legality of who to place on drone kill lists. John Kiriakou, a CIA whistleblower who exposed the Bush torture program, told Democracy Now that “in almost all cases” Haines said it was legal to add names, including American citizens like Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son: “They were American citizens who had never been charged with a crime. They had never faced their accusers in a court of law. There was no due process for them. She’s never had to answer for that.”
Haines also played a key role in covering up the 5,000+ page Senate Intelligence Committee report on Bush-era CIA torture by redacting the public version to 500 pages, and she later refused to discipline CIA agents after they were caught hacking into Senate Intelligence Committee computers in an effort to thwart the investigation into the agency’s torture program. According to Kiriakou, she not only shielded hackers from accountability, but even awarded them the Career Intelligence Medal.
During the Trump years, Haines supported Gina Haspel’s nomination as CIA Director. Haspel ran a “black site” torture prison in Thailand and also drafted a memo ordering the destruction of almost 100 videotapes documenting CIA torture.
The swift nomination of Haines on the first day of the new Biden administration should speak volumes as to what kind of “soul” Biden hopes to restore at the national level, and it also says a lot about what we should expect from Bernie Sanders - who endorsed and campaigned for Biden - and was also just tapped as Chairman of the Senate Budget Committee.
Earlier this month, Sanders was asked by Politico whether he foresees an expansion of healthcare under the new administration. Bernie replied: “What we will be doing is working within the context of what Biden wants.” As if this response wasn’t disappointing enough to Bernie supporters, it now seems as though “working within the context of what Biden wants” also extends to other areas such as supporting drone warriors and torture apologists.
Update - 1/27/2020: Since publishing this article, Bernie Sanders has also voted in support of former Raytheon board member Lloyd Austin as Biden’s pick for Secretary of Defense, and on 1/26, Bernie voted in support of Libya war cheerleader Antony Blinken as Biden’s pick for Secretary of State.
While these votes may appear on the surface to be strange anomalies, a closer examination of Bernie’s long history of working with the Democratic Party establishment - especially on their wars - provides critical context.