SPECIAL - Gina Haspel and Her First Female Director CIA Nomination

I don't feel good in supporting someone Donald Trump does, but he's bound to get something right as POTUS. And I think this is one.

Being an intellectual and with knowledge of the CIA and covert intelligence mechanism in general as well as how covert operations work and the dynamics therein, I have the following orientation on this topic. IF I did not, being the progressive I am and have been, I would possibly be against Gina Haspel.

For I see others like me, who are against her. But I feel in their good intentions, they are simply ignorant overall of how and what we're dealing with here. Even in the knowledge and intelligence of them of them, such as Kamala Harris, who unlike Fox News' juvenile opinion, had very succinct and direct questions, unlike some of the confirmation hearing.

I agree with Michael Hayden who said we NEED someone who will stand up to our questionably qualified POTUS. With all his people whittled down to the current YES men and women, who is telling this child president what reality is? Whomever you'd name, they're not enough. And who from intelligence would really push back on Trump's childish rantings?

That's Gina. Flat out.

If we really want to re-litigate CIA overreach in enhanced interrogations, then it should be those who ordered it, not those who were in the trenches and abandoned or abused later. Look, if you treat someone like Gina this way after what America demanded back in the day, then stop asking those things of our people and later abusing them for it.

As she has said today when testifying she would not follow an illegal order from the president. Odd that is actually a serious potential concern with Donald Trump but we've already seen that to be a serious concern. When you do put people in harm's way, as Gina was, don't later disingenuously claim ignorance and damn them for it.

And that, goes on up the chain right to George W. Bush, the #Republican party and their toxic #GOP methodologies of subverting America.

If you think this is a bad idea, you're just not fully informed and have only a Fox News level and mediocre orientation on this matter.

Let me give you another perspective on Gina Haspel, who, if she gets the position, will be the FIRST FEMALE head of the CiA!

Here's my point.

We had a chance for a woman to become the FIRST AMERICAN FEMALE PRESIDENT..

But NO. People allowed themselves to be easily swayed not to vote for her, which played right into Russia, Putin, Republican party and Donald Trump's grubby little hands.

Remember, if you didn't vote for her, you are part of that. Whatever your reasons.

NOW we have an opportunity for the FIRST HEAD OF THE CIA and what happens?

People are finding reasons not to let that happen. Again. Another women cvould lead but no, a woman has to be perfect to lead, unlike most of the make leaders.

WHAT IN THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE? Are you children? Religius with juvenile views of reality? Virgins? I really don't get it.

We're losing to Republicans and conservatives repeatedly because of crap like this!

You don't get to have the perfect person to be the first.And this is really so very important.

On top of which she really is a very good, excellent choice even. But not, not touchy feely enough for you because of following orders at a time that was patently schizophrenic. And now people want to judge when they are calm, feeling safe, not terrorized, as happened back then and I SAID BACK THEN, THIS WAS THE KIND OF CRAP WE'D SEE AND...HERE WE ARE.

We demanded things of the military and intelligence communities I didn't want, they didn't want but it was shoved down their throats. I knew, and they knew they would be the ones to suffer later, and right then if they refused and would be called traitors. Don't remember what it was like then?

JUST THINK ABOUT THAT FOR A MINUTE. I get not wanting her because Trump chose her, I fully get that and I hate he agrees with me. But that's how it is. You don't get a perfect situation to make a woman first in anything and that's how it's going to be UNTIL YOU START PUTTING WOMEN IN CHARGE OF THINGS.

No! De Vos was a horrible choice, but hey, she's there. Now we have a woman I'd bet my life on, but she's not good enough? I wouldn't trust De Vos (or her brother, Erik Prince) to hold my lunch money.

What pisses me off about all this is I said this would happen and here we are, throwing those under the bus who did what we demanded.

Shame, America. All that talk about "Thank you for your service", but this. What do you think soldiers do in war? Hypocrites.

Stand behind the people you send out into harm's way who sacrifice to protect us.

Don't treat them like trash later when your senses return, when the Zeitgeist changes, and when you feel you can now feel pretty and judge others for our acts.

That's it. I'm done. Just consider the next time a woman, appropriate for an important position is up for it, will you support her, or pick at her to find a reason for her to not take the position.

Then wonder if you REALLY DO want women to have positions of importance.

Good grief. America gave Donald J Trump the presidency. And Gina can't head the CIA? Hillary couldn't be president?

Give me a break!

It's weird watching the Gina Haspel hearing and feeling on the side of mostly Republicans.

Surreal, distasteful considering their behaviors of late. It's like that hearing doesn't remember America just a few years ago.

Dems are playing Devil's advocate and that is good, but some very stupid questions, redundancies, lack of reality and history and I find it, disconcerting.

I'm used to Democrats not being bold enough, not fighting hard enough, while not being this foolish. In the most part they're asking the wrong questions. If feels like they don't like her just because Trump does, but let's not act like Trump as he does against Obama. Let's make the best choice.

As for those videos (echoes again of emails?), when I heard they were destroyed years ago, I said good! Because in the future there WILL be a REAL witch hunt, and... here we are. As the Bush administration was forcing things onto our intelligence community, I could foresee the future abuse of our intel officers in the future, it was obvious it would happen. The point being, if  they were going to ask too much, then stand by your people. Who are now being thrown under the bus. It was bound to happen.

I was against torture from the beginning, but if Bush was going to force it, as he did, then let's not wipe out our intelligence community now over leader's damages to the CIA and democracy. This, is ignorance. IF you want to do something now that is decent, put Bush on trial for the murder of thousands and thousands of Iraqis and Americans and others because of an illegal war they knew was illegal but had plausible deniability over. Which they built into it. But let's not now take it out on our foot soldiers.

Yes, we should be pissed, we should not ever have been torturing. But we were scared, we were afraid, and acting as such. Remember that. We acted like frightened children, striking out in the dark. I was embarrassed for us at the time. I still am. And this makes it worse because the reality I saw coming, is here.

We also have to protect and serve. Just let them do that. And don't ask of these people, what you will later chastise them for.

Personal Strength

Yesterday was 9/11. There were thoughts of pain, death, strength, power, terrorism, reflection on who we are as a nation, as a people. Life, is more complicated that most of us can handle. We tend to buffer it with emotions, drama, even lies. Some of us use conspiracies as a buffer. It takes strength, more than we have sometimes, to handle reality.

Life is far more complex than we can typically see. But that is on a larger scale basis. I tried to pull it down to the micro level, to the individual level. To the level of two people, of one person. About how we perceive strength, what it is, when it should be used, how it relates to our lives.

In order to evoke thought on this 9/11 and its fifteen year anniversary, just another attempt at pointing out a few of the dangers to America today, not in order of import (or contempt):

-Religious fundamentalism with a death slant to it.
-Conspiracy theorists who mostly don't know what they are talking about and have based theory on conjecture and agenda based partisan politics.
-Nation building as we have been attempting it.
-Attempting to spread democracy in tribal nations without a cohesive nation.
-Using military power where any other power would work better.
-Putin and Putin's view of Russia.
-Kim Jong Un, and his and his military handler's view of North Korea and its relation to the world.
-China's fear of North Korea and it's lack of acting.
-Donald Trump, his lies, immaturity, self important narcissism and ignorance.
-Hillary, IF she doesn't change up our direction and continues to use old paradigms in world and national politics.
-Political and extreme Conservatives and Evangelicals.
-Unclear understanding of reality in national and personal considerations.
-Old paradigm views on running America and its interactions with the world at large.
-Maintaining wars to allow otherwise unallowable issues to play out.
-War.
-Military, industrial, corporate complexes to rule over the needs of people.
-Poor education.
-Cyberterrorist by international gangs like ISIS and cyberwarfare attacks by nation states like Russia and China and maybe if not probably also, NK. But really, wouldn't it make more sense for Russia to lay blame on NK, while China would not for obvious reasons?
-Poor infrastructure.
-Ignorance. Ignorance supported as intellect and occult knowledge of what is unknowable.
-Giving a voice to those ignorants and old paradigm thinkers (including racists, misogynists and bigots) who should not have one on a national basis and have quite simply not kept up with the world in our psychological, sociological and technological advances.
-Forcing others to continually have to prove negatives on a national basis.
-Terrorism

I'm pretty open minded. I accepted people voting for Mitt Romney, and even miniBush.

But supporting Donald Trump simply makes a travesty of our election process and you really need to face up to that if you support him.

Hillary, is no reason, no excuse to vote instead for Trump. It just exhibits your ignorance more grandly.

Voting for Trump puts one in a similar category with words like grandiose, delusional and self important.

IF you can't vote for Hillary, I do get that. Though you're probably wrong there too but that's another topic. I mean, you may be right in not voting for Hillary but from what I've seen, it's probably for the wrong reasons and the incorrect priorities.

However, if you can't vote for Hillary and you can somehow come to your senses, though if you vote republican I really don't have high hopes anyway, then simply do not vote.
Cast your vote as many do in casting for a third party.

Vote your conscience. If you can't vote Hillary, then do not vote.

Someone just made that clear this past week.

That some people simply should not vote. We shouldn't force people, pushing them into voting. If they don't know what they are doing or if they think they do and yet they don't; if they are smart enough to know not to vote, perhaps they know what they are doing, perhaps we should leave them alone.

For all the rest of us, vote sane, at the very least.

You know, the original intent of the Founding Fathers was NOT to allow everyone to vote anyway. Just those who could vote intelligently, with informed consideration, with a standing for and with the needs of the country and not simply for needs for themselves, but with a true and honest consideration for themselves and therefore...all of us.

I'd like to move beyond 9/11 today though. I want to move closer to home to each of us. From an international, from an national, to a personal level. From world or national strength, to interpersonal and personal strength and what that really is.

I realized something about strength today.

I was watching Woody Allen's film, Manhattan. There a scene, after he was with Mary after he had been with Tracy, after Mary had been with Yale, while he was married to Connie, after the divorce of Isaac (Allen) who was now with, as I said, Mary. Yale calls her, in the next room from Isaac.

Life can be in reality, hidden behind the scenes, out of our sight, complicated. It's one of the things Allen basis his films on, pokes fun at, brings up in various lights and tries to make us realize, life is not black and white. We tend to categorize things as good or bad but in reality, it is a very grey kind of thing. You see something bad, but in shifting focus sometimes, just a little, it becomes humorous, or understanding, even... noble.

Yes, some things are just bad, just pure evil. However much of what we label as such, simply isn't due to ignorance or a lack of understanding, if not simply of maturity.

It occurs to me, and I'm single now, but a while back I was married, married to someone I thought to be a very attractive woman. Attractive overall, not only in looks. Before I had met her, I was trying to get another job. After a divorce. And I found one. But the woman who interviewed me for the job, an attractive woman in her early 30s, from the beginning was extremely attracted to me.

I got the job. Eighteen months later I quit that job, at that point, with a new wife, the attractive woman I mentioned. I then contracted for some years (as a Senior Technical Writer). I ended up eventually at the company I've been now working at for twenty years.

During that first year or so, the women who had previously hired me elsewhere (the UW), was working then for a contract employment agency. We had both left the University of Washington where I had worked for seven and a half years, the final eighteen months for the department the woman had hired me for.

I was going through more than one contract agency and so wanted to give her my business as we had been friends and coworkers. Kind of like, we were family. When I had heard what she was doing, that she also had left the US, I looked her up. Then after talking with her, I signed up with her at her new agency.

See, I had accepted a job (where I still work for twenty-one years now at this point) because I had to, in the hope that I wouldn't work again for a large company. The new company was a thirty person company, but a subsidiary of a much larger company, which I had wanted to avoid after working for US West Technologies, a thirteen state company at that time in the 1990s.

The potential that I might find exactly what I wanted, was alluring. To exemplify my worry, I said I'd accept the job at the thirty person company as long as they guaranteed I would never work for the larger company, and because I had been out of work for five and a half months and we really needed the money. I had a family to support, a wife and two kids.

One day this woman called me to ask me to lunch. Nothing unusual there, I was used to agents taking me to lunch to woo me to a new job or consideration, and them picking up the tab. And she was female and attractive. I was married then and was not looking for anything outside of my marriage, but would you rather go to lunch with an ugly person who was interesting and funny, or an attractive woman who was? So I went, innocently.

We went to a nice restaurant near to my work at Von's ("Best martinis in town"). We had lunch. It was tasty, as usual. Then she hit me with it, taking me totally by surprise. Her husband was a real hot mess. He had gotten into drugs, he had robbed a store, gotten caught, ended up in prison for a couple of years or so.

She had her needs, she had her fantasy about me all these years and she had her proposal. We could have an affair while her husband was gone. I could have her. It would never affect my marriage, she wanted no more, just compassion, a friend with benefits, a friend. Someone to help her through those next two years. Would I consider, she wanted to know, that kind of a situation. I was still at that point in my marriage where I was completely satisfied at home.

Something that changed radically only a few years later as I entered into a nightmare of a marriage. One where only a decade or so later I realized there were serious surreptitious mental and emotional problems on my wife's side, potential for her having had affairs while she was away for weeks on her job. One beyond most people's imaginings. One that could easily make a MOW, a "Movie of the Week" type of heart wrenching type of a film.

What I realized today, while watching the film, Manhattan, was this... I should have turned her down as I did. But perhaps I should have had the strength to give her a good, deep kiss and then, let her go, forever. To release her from her fantasy about me, but give her that taste of what the imagination had been desiring so that from then on she'd have had a feel for the reality and thus, somewhat temper her imagination and desires. At very least, she'd have something based upon what could have been.

Considering after that day that I never saw nor heard from her again, I now feel some regret. Though at the time I would have felt betrayal to my wife whom I loved and lusted after very much, Lust appropriately place. I now feel if I were as strong an individual as I believed I always have been, then I should have said goodbye, given her that final gift, that present from one friend to another, on our parting forever, between two who could have been, and yet, never will be.

That is what I realized today when I paused the film, Manhattan, and thought about all this, realizing, I needed to write it all down and share it.

Still, I had to consider it all first.

What IF I had kissed her and after all, why DIDN'T I?

It's obvious, I suppose.

Was I THAT strong in denying her? Was I just immature? Would I have gone off with her, to have had an affair as she desired?

You know in hindsight, the affair would have been okay, possibly. Sometimes in doing what is wrong, you speed up the demise of something that will die, you save everyone pain, you save yourself grief, but you may also cause yourself the pain of knowing to thine own self not true.

My marriage in the end didn't work out. I have reason now to see how much I deserved al lot more compassion and affection than I got through much of that final marriage in my life to date. Perhaps I was the only strong one in denying another an affair with me. I was true to myself though, in not having that affair.

Had I not been married, had she not, I would most surely have had a relationship with that woman. No doubt in my mind. But I had a rule not to involve myself with those who were attached to others. Or when I was attached. I have higher standards than that. There are so many single people why would you ever get involved with someone with a potential for excessive drama?

Still, that's all not the point here.

The point is... reality. Just what IS, reality?

9/11 Was Not Just A Terrorist Attack - The Return of America the Great

9/11 was not just a terrorist attack. At very least, its effects were much more far reaching.

9/11 was an injection of poison that no one seemed to notice. That was the damage that was done, not just the lives lost. America was poisoned with a shot injected into the largest city of this once great country by those deluded with hate, by those who grew to hate us in part from our own actions over the past hundred years of our paying no attention whatsoever to what our actions were doing to those then third world nations of the world. We were injected with a poison that spread out rapidly, reaching across our country, and then spreading out to the world.

In modern pop culture terms it was like we were bit by a zombie and then we bit others conveying the poison to the world. The infection spread partly from fear of terrorism, but also from our own words and actions. America is rather new to the need to protect our homelands from terrorism and sadly, we reacted to it like children.

Fear is contagious and we helped to spread it. This was what FDR meant when he said, "Only Thing We Have to Fear Is Fear Itself."

After 9/11 we were turned into a Zombie country. We were infectious, WE then were dangerous. We went to war against the nearest country that fit our need to kill; someone, anyone We did what was right before we were attacked. We should have cleaned up in Iraq in the 80s, not in 2003. We rightly went into Afghanistan in 2002 and attacked our attackers, Al Qaeda and their associates the Taliban. We nearly devastated them and the Taliban. But then we let Bin Laden escape to Pakistan. Why? Because, we weren't through satiating our revenge. You can blame the Bush Administration, they were the head of the pimple at that time that was America.

What other country has two million people in thousands of prisons and jails in its own country? Who had secret prisons around the world? In Romania, in Poland, in Guantanamo? That poison we were injected with on 9/11 made us go crazy. Our own past with nonsense like our "War on Drugs", a war on many of our own citizenry, gave us a mindset that allowed us to be led into a "War on Terror". So we went into the longest war in our history in Afghanistan, a "war" that spread against a rag tag global group of terrorists and wannabees. We found a way to allow ourselves to torture prisoners, to terrorize individuals in a confined setting. We used things like "extraordinary rendition" to kidnap and torture and when that became too difficult to do, we found other countries who had brutal natures and we allowed them to do those things in our name.

The Bush Administration kept these things going for many of those years. Those secret prisons were shut down in 2006 and in 2009 it became official policy that we do not do that anymore, under a different administration. For years the flag draped coffins at Dover were banned to be photographed when America's children, killed in war, were brought home to their final resting place. The worst thing we can ever do, is to force ourselves away from facing that we are indeed at war. When at war you need it to be painfully obvious. Let that be a lesson to us.

Labeling so many things as "war" allowed us to think as you do in a war. In war we do things that are not normally allowed. Murder, is legal and not even called, "murder". The "Fog of War" includes killing the lame, women, old people, and children. It allows us to kill our own citizens, something that should never happen without due process and judicial interference. And we did that. We killed an American citizen with a missile in another country by first labeling him as traitor. His father even went to court to sue the country to keep it from happening, asking instead that he captured, to bring his son back, give him a trial as he was guaranteed by having been through all his life, a great thing, an American citizen. But in killing him we devalued what we are as Americans.

One of the great things about our Country, about being an American citizen, is the protection of our own country and in having due process, not presidential dictate leading to capital punishment. After we killed that American, we then killed his sixteen year old son, shortly thereafter and in the same manner, using a bomb delivered on the end of a missile.

Is this who we are now?

Is that America? Does that sound like America to you? Is this, what our once "Great Nation" is about now? All this because we were afraid? Because of Fear? When we are afraid does that give us the right to throw our long standing ethical principles, right out the window?

President Obama, as soon as he took office on January 22, 2009, put a stop to our torturing people around the world, on principle. Some people complain a lot about Pres. Obama and what he has done since coming into office. They have various considerations on how we should be rebuilding our economy, treating our citizens, and fighting (or even being in) a war. But the one thing the Obama Administration has been and is doing, is helping our country to heal itself after ten years of our longest war ever (other than our "War" on drugs and the American citizen).

Healing is difficult, it can be painful, but it is necessary.

Look, having a "War" on things is dangerous. That attitude alone is dangerous and we need to stop doing it. Legalizing Marijuana strangely enough, is one way to help end that mindset of having a "war" on something because it means an end to extraordinary actions against something that some only some people don't like. When it leads our own country into rationalizing actions against our own citizens, then we really have gone astray. Whether it is arresting someone in our own country for possessing even small amounts of Cannabis, or in blowing an American up in another country for terrorism and being a traitor, we need to make up our minds who we are and what we are allowed to do, in any circumstance.

As it helped lead us into our, out of context, "War on Terrorism", something that sounds good, feels good but counter-intuitively isn't good, it also led us into something else. Things like the "Tea Party", extremism in our country, the Republican Right taking over to the detriment of our country and even the GOP, their own party. But as things go these types of things tend to be cyclical and the pendulum can only swing so far to one extreme or the other before it either swings back, or simply breaks the mechanism. And we have been far too close to that for far too long now.

Being an American means something. It should mean something, anyway. It should mean something extraordinary and these last ten years and more we have diluted what it means to be an American. We need to stop that. We need to get back on the path and we need to heal. Not only ourselves within our own country, but also in how others view our country and its citizens. We need to get back to the business of being "Great" and not saying it. It's not just about our military power or our economy. It's also about our principles, our existence, our being a leader in doing things around the world, and within our own country. We need to decide what is "right" and stick to it.

Sometimes being that kind of a country is difficult, it can be painful. Lives can be lost over it. But we have in the past been the kind of country that can "take it on the chin" and continue on, even through difficult times, and continue doing what is right.

Which kind of country do you want us to be?

During these past ten years we have at times been, in contemporary parlance a, "chicken shit" country. Literally, we have been scared of our own shadows. Remember the colored, "Shades of Danger" alerts that we stopped using in 2011? As it turned out, we only needed them for feeling all fuzzy safe. The Bush administration had pushed us into an old fashioned Texas style retribution and we all know that revenge destroys both the deserving and the undeserving. It can also make one into the other.

But now we are painfully trying to leave that juvenile opiate of war and the mindset of retribution behind. Shouldn't we now finally go back to being the kind of country we were once again? Shouldn't we allow this healing process that the Obama Administration is trying to help us with, happen? To return to being once again that great nation that we once were?

We have evolved during this process. We are a different country now than we were in 2000. We have entered the 21st Century as a country at war and we need to stop that and become a country that is on the forefront of delivering peace. Of advocating Peace. If we want to be at war then we need to be at war against those who are fighting a war against us. But it is not toward our own citizens. It is not toward those who use recreational drugs. It is not toward terrorists. Terrorists require police actions, intelligence operations, not full scale war actions. Going to war in Iraq when any "war action" was really in Afghanistan, was simply ludicrous.

War against terrorism is a concept that may very will never end. Those wannabees who wish to be terrorists can simply do so. But do they deserve a war? Maybe so, but do WE deserve it? No. Surely we can handle them with smaller, less devastating actions that will not destroy those innocents nearby them as "collateral damage" and create new terrorists in their wake because of our killing their relatives and loved ones, as inadvertently as it may be.

Jeh Johnson, the Defense Department's General Counsel, the head Lawyer for the Defense Department, went out this past week for the Obama Administration to say just this. He spoke at Oxford University in Britain and said that wars against something like terrorism can go on forever and we need to find an end to it. He said that we are fighting against a new kind of thing and that at some point we need to call an end to the "war" actions.

"How will this conflict end. It is an unconventional conflict against an unconventional enemy, and will not end in conventional terms." - Jeh Johnson

At some point he said, this will have to be turned over to police and intelligence agencies, and the sooner the better.

America is finally coming back into its own. We are striving to return to being the once great nation we had been and perhaps in the end, we will become an even greater nation than before.

A lot of what I'm talking about here falls under a single word: Honor. War gives a wink and a nod to acting in dishonorable ways, and that has to stop. We have to acknowledge our past actions but then we have to move on to heal from them.

But we have to allow it to happen, we have to let it happen, and we have to support those who are trying to do this hard work. We have to want it and embrace the change as well as a embrace a different, more mature way of being and looking at things. We have to be brave, to persevere through adversity and no matter what, we have to not allow those fear mongers who have spoken out for so long and have led us astray, to influence us, ever again.

In the end, we have to be Honorable. We have to face it, to admit it, that we were not at some points in these past ten years. And then we have to move on to build ourselves a better way of being, under any situation.

This, is America.

Make that mean something once again. Allow America to again come into its own and to remain so from here forward, no matter what.