January, 14 2021, 11:00pm EDT

What Senators Need to Ask Avril Haines at Her Confirmation Hearing Today
WASHINGTON
Avril Haines, President-elect Biden's designee to be the Director of National Intelligence, will appear before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) at noon today for her confirmation hearing. As has been reported in the Daily Beast and elsewhere, Haines has a history of positions and ties that are concerning to many who support civil liberties and who oppose torture and the revolving door.
Moreover, the ODNI has jurisdiction over a number of key matters -- such as government surveillance programs -- relative to which Haines's positions are largely unknown. Demand Progress opposes the confirmation of Haines because, among other reasons, of her history of covering up for torture and torturers and her work for the data-mining firm Palantir.
"The Trump administration acted with impunity for civil rights and civil liberties, sought to whitewash torture and torturers, and was a cesspool of corporate corruption," said Demand Progress Executive Director David Segal. "The Biden administration must offer a clean break from this -- and, unfortunately, Avril Haines's record means the burden is on her to prove that she will be different."
Demand Progress is encouraging senators and the press to seek answers from Haines to the following questions:
On the Torture Investigation and Report:
Background: In 2014, when Haines was deputy director of the CIA, an internal 'accountability board' investigated whether discipline was warranted for the CIA officials who hacked into the SSCI's computers during the Committee's investigation into torture conducted by the CIA. The board overruled the CIA Inspector General and recommended not to discipline any officials involved. When Haines met with the board, she accepted their recommendation. Later, she was on the team tasked with redacting the Senate investigation's report for public consumption. Only 525 pages of the 6,700 page report were released.
- Do you still hold that there were not grounds to discipline the people who spied on SSCI's investigation into torture conducted by the CIA?
- Do you believe there are ever circumstances where the CIA or other intelligence officials may lawfully hack or order others to hack into Senate computers? Please specifically enumerate under what circumstances this would be lawful.
- One of the torture report investigators, Daniel Jones, described your position on releasing the torture report as "quite the opposite" of then-Vice President Biden's, who was instead "the most prominent member of the Obama administration advocating for the declassification and release" of the report. Is it accurate that you were arguing for less public access to the report than President Biden?
- Were you arguing for a more constrained release than the Democratic members of SSCI supported?
- Do you support the declassification and release of the original 6,700 page SSCI report on CIA torture? If so, will you commit to completing this process within the next year?
On Her Support for Gina Haspel for CIA Director:
Background: During Gina Haspel's 2018 confirmation process to serve as CIA Director, Haines publicly supported her appointment, despite Haspel's role in overseeing torture at a CIA blacksite as well as assisting in the coverup of CIA torture through the destruction of interrogation videotapes.
- Is it your position that Haspel's conduct regarding torture and its cover-up was legal and warranted? If not, why did you nevertheless publicly support her nomination? Do you believe that Ms. Haspel and those who engaged in similar conduct should be held accountable, and in what way?
- Do you agree that destruction of evidence that is material to a Congressional investigation is unethical and grounds for removal from office?
- Do you commit to not destroying evidence, as Gina Haspel did, that is relevant to Congressional oversight of US intelligence agencies?
On Her Entanglements With Firms Like Palantir:
Background: Haines has been affiliated with the controversial surveillance firm Palantir, which has made billions in lucrative government contracts. In June, The Intercept reported that after Haines joined the Biden campaign her affiliation to Palantir was scrubbed from her bio at the Brookings Institute. She also received compensation from WestExec, a consulting firm with a notoriously secretive client list that includes high tech start-ups seeking Pentagon contracts.
- Do you still have any financial interest in Palantir?
- Do you commit to releasing, before your confirmation vote, the full details of your compensation, a comprehensive list of your responsibilities, and any ongoing connection to Palantir?
- You told The Daily Beast that ""The vast majority of my work for Palantir was related to diversity and inclusion, with a particular focus on gender." What exactly was the rest of your work, and what percentage of your work was dedicated exclusively to work on diversity and inclusion?
- Do you think it is ethical for senior intelligence officials to circle through the revolving door as you would if confirmed as DNI: going from career civil servant to consultant-for-hire by an industry dependent on contracts from the agencies you helped run, and then returning back to government as the head of the United States intelligence community?
- At a minimum, the American people deserve to know when the revolving door is turning, and that means knowing who your clients were at WestExec. Will you release a list of all companies you had as clients while you worked there, and what you did for them?
On the Scope of Government Surveillance:
Background: On March 15th, Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act expired. The government used Section 215 for warrantless acquisition of records from businesses in the United States -- including the telephone records of essentially all Americans. On the last Senate day before expiration, then-Chairman of this SSCI Richard Burr asserted on the floor that in the absence of Section 215, the government can do "all of this, without Congress's permission, with no guardrails." Section 215 then expired, and has not been reauthorized.
- Is it your legal conclusion that the president has the inherent executive authority, under EO 12333 or otherwise, to acquire the records of, for instance, people who visit a particular website, in the absence of explicit statutory or court authorization to do so?
- Is it your legal conclusion that Congress may lawfully curtail whatever inherent power the executive may have by enumerating the exclusive means by which the government acquires records of people in the United States? Or do you believe that Congress cannot restrict what intelligence surveillance people in the United States are subject to?
- Is it your legal conclusion that the president has the inherent executive authority to bypass Congress and the courts by simply purchasing information about people in the United States from the likes of data brokers?
- Do you commit to declassifying in your first 180 days any operational interpretations of surveillance laws, for instance from the Office of Legal Counsel or FISA Court, that relate to the privacy of people in the United States, including Section 215 of the Patriot Act, Section 702 of the FISA Amendment Act, and Executive Order 12333?
- Do you commit to declassifying any legal interpretations of EO 12333's language regarding surveillance that is not "precluded by applicable law"?
- Will you commit to publicly releasing a precise enumeration of what surveillance of people in the United States is "not precluded by applicable law"?
- Is it your position that everything Congress or the courts have not explicitly "precluded" the collection of may be lawfully acquired pursuant to inherent executive authority?
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"I mean, I watch you out there with the pickets," said the former president, "but I don't think you're picketing for the right thing."
Sep 28, 2023
Former President Donald Trump used his speech at a nonunion plant in Clinton Township, Michigan Wednesday night to simultaneously posture as a lifelong champion of workers and denigrate the United Auto Workers' historic strike against the Big Three U.S. car manufacturers, dismissing the union's fight for better wages and benefits as effectively meaningless.
"I don't care what you get in the next two weeks or three weeks or five weeks," Trump said. "They're going to be closing up and they're going to be building those cars in China and other places. It's a hit job in Michigan and on Detroit."
It was a theme the former president and 2024 GOP frontrunner hit repeatedly throughout his remarks at Drake Enterprises, a truck parts manufacturer that offered to host Trump's rally: The electric vehicle transition and the Biden administration's efforts to accelerate it are going to send jobs overseas and leave the U.S. automobile industry in ruins.
"It doesn't make a damn bit of difference what you get because in two years you're all going to be out of business, you're not getting anything," Trump said. "I mean, I watch you out there with the pickets, but I don't think you're picketing for the right thing."
The former president repeatedly and falsely accused the Biden administration of attempting to bring about a "transition to hell" and impose "electric vehicle mandates that will spell the death of the American auto industry," a narrative that was also prominent during the Republican primary debate that Trump skipped.
Kevin Munoz, a spokesperson for President Joe Biden's 2024 reelection campaign, said in response that Trump is "lying about President Biden's agenda to distract from his failed track record of trickle-down tax cuts, closed factories, and jobs outsourced to China." During Trump's four years in office, the offshoring of U.S. jobs increased.
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As HuffPost's Jonathan Cohn reported late Wednesday, "Since Biden took office in January 2021, total auto industry employment in the U.S. has risen from about 948,000 to 1,073,000 jobs, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That's a monthly rate of about 4,000 new auto jobs a month."
Challenging the notion that the Biden administration's EV policies are imperiling the U.S. auto industry, Cohn noted that electric vehicle subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act "will close the cost gap so that companies manufacturing electric vehicles and their parts can compete."
"And there are lots of signs that the effort is working," Cohn wrote. "Auto companies have announced plans to build literally dozens of new factories in the U.S., many in what's coming to be known as the 'battery belt,' stretching from Georgia in the South to Michigan in the North. They are expected to generate hundreds of thousands of jobs directly, plus many more (along with economic growth) indirectly."
The UAW leadership has made clear that, unlike Trump, it doesn't oppose the transition to electric vehicles.
Rather, the union wants policymakers to ensure that EV manufacturing jobs are unionized. UAW president Shawn Fain has criticized Biden—who joined union members on the picket line earlier this week—for not doing enough to prevent a "race to the bottom" in the EV transition as automakers increasingly invest in the nonunion U.S. South.
Fain has also not been shy about his feelings toward the former president.
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Trump—who has repeatedly called on the UAW to endorse his presidential run—didn't respond Wednesday when asked by a reporter whether he supports the union's push for a nearly 40% wage increase for autoworkers, who have seen their hourly pay decline sharply over the past two decades.
During his speech, Trump "didn't specifically address demands made by autoworkers, other than to say he would protect jobs in a way that would lead to higher wages," the Detroit Free Pressreported.
"But he left it unclear how he would do so," the newspaper added, "given that he didn't demand specific wage increases as president."
It's not clear how many union members were in the audience at Trump's speech, though some were waving "Auto Workers for Trump" and "Union Members for Trump" signs. One individual who held a "Union Members for Trump" sign during the rally admitted to a reporter for The Detroit News that she's not a union member.
"Another person with a sign that read 'Auto Workers for Trump' said he wasn't an auto worker when asked for an interview. Both people didn't provide their names," the outlet reported.
Chris Marchione, political director of the International Union of Painters and Allied TradesDistrict Council 1M in Michigan, toldJacobin's Alex Press that at least one local "right-to-work" activist assisted the Trump campaign in organizing Wednesday's rally.
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"The idea that Donald Trump has ever, or will ever, care about working people is demonstrably false," said AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler. "For his entire time as president, he actively sought to roll back worker protections, wages, and the right to join a union at every level."
"UAW members are on the picket line fighting for fair wages and against the very corporate greed that Donald Trump represents," Shuler added. "Working people see through his transparent efforts to reinvent history. We are not buying the lies that Donald Trump is selling. We will continue to support and organize for the causes and candidates that represent our values."
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The U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday rejected a bipartisan amendment to the 2024 military spending bill that would have prohibited the transfer of cluster munitions—which are banned under a treaty ratified by more than 100 nations but not the United States—to any country.
The House voted 160-269 on the amendment to next year's National Defense Authorization Act co-sponsored by Reps. Sarah Jacobs (D-Calif.), Matt Gaetz (R-Fl.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), and Jim McGovern (D-Mass.). Seventy-five Democrats voted for the measure, while 137 voted "no"; 85 GOP lawmakers approved the amendment while 132 opposed it.
The vote took place less than a week after U.S. President Joe Biden said the United States would send more cluster munitions to Ukraine.
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"America is an outlier. We are one of the few countries that hasn't become party to the Convention on Cluster Munitions, and that is a grave mistake," she asserted, referring to a landmark 2008 treaty, to which 112 nations are parties.
Jacobs continued:
These weapons maim and kill indiscriminately. In 2021, the Landmine and Cluster Munition Monitor found that over 97% of casualties from cluster bomb remnants were civilians, and two-thirds of those were children. That's because these bomblets are small, colorful, and interesting shapes, so to children they look like toys. So when kids find these unexploded bomblets stuck in trees, or in the water, or simply on the ground and try to pick them up and play with them, they could lose a limb or their life in the blink of an eye.... These weapons are unpredictable, and the human cost is far too high to justify.
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"These cluster bombs are indiscriminate. They've killed tens of thousands of people."
Since Vietnam, the U.S. has used cluster bombs in wars including the 1999 NATO air campaign against Yugoslavia; the 1991 Desert Storm war in Iraq and Kuwait; and in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen during the so-called War on Terror. U.S. cluster munitions have been linked to birth defects, miscarriages, cancers, and other ailments.
Earlier this year, the U.S. began sending artillery-fired cluster munitions to Ukraine. Russian invaders and Ukrainian homeland defenders have both killed and wounded soldiers and civilians with cluster bombs during the war.
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"Sending these weapons anywhere makes us complicit in unavoidable civilian harm and creates blowback that undermines our national security."
Last week, Biden informed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that the United States will provide Kyiv with long-range missiles with cluster munition warheads.
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Multiple efforts by lawmakers to ban the export of U.S. cluster munitions have failed to advance. Earlier this year, the GOP-controlled House Rules Committee voted down a resolution proposed by Omar and Jacobs (D-Calif.), while backing another led by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.)—whose controversial sponsorship doomed the proposal.
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One critic called it "an outrageous endorsement of the Israeli government's systematic discrimination against Palestinian Americans and a reward to the most extremist, racist government in Israel's history."
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Human rights advocates on Wednesday forcefully denounced the Biden administration's move to let Israelis apply to travel to the United States without visas, and vice versa, despite charges that Israel's treatment of Palestinian Americans violates the program's legal requirements.
The U.S. departments of Homeland Security and State confirmed that by November 30, "the Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA) will be updated to allow citizens and nationals of Israel to apply to travel to the United States for tourism or business purposes for up to 90 days without first obtaining a U.S. visa."
U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas said that the designation of Israel into the Visa Waiver Program (VWP) "represents over a decade of work and coordination," and "is an important recognition of our shared security interests and the close cooperation between our two countries."
While U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken added that "this important achievement will enhance freedom of movement for U.S. citizens, including those living in the Palestinian territories or traveling to and from them," rights groups and some American lawmakers have been pushing back against such claims.
U.S. Sens. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) and Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), joined by over a dozen colleagues, wrote in a letter to Blinken earlier this month that according to a memorandum of understanding (MOU) signed in this summer, "Israel is not expected to fully implement one system that all U.S. citizen travelers can use for purposes of visa waiver travel until May 1, 2024, well beyond the September 30, 2023 deadline for meeting program requirements."
"The MOU states that Israel will employ 'an interim process for a U.S. citizen who is a resident of the West Bank.' Such a two-tiered system of entry inherently violates the administration's own standard for reciprocity that 'blue is blue'—meaning 'equal treatment and freedom of travel for all U.S. citizens regardless of national origin, religion, or ethnicity," the senators noted. "We have already learned of a number of U.S. citizen families who flew to Israel to take advantage of visa waiver travel under the new MOU who were denied entry for having Gaza IDs."
Van Hollen and Schatz, along with Sens. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), and Peter Welch (D-Vt.), reiterated their concerns in a joint statement Wednesday, saying that "to date, Israel has failed to meet the 'blue is blue' requirement. Adherence to this important American tenet of reciprocity and equal treatment of all U.S. citizens is critical to the integrity of the Visa Waiver Program, and we are deeply concerned with the administration's decision to move forward in violation of that principle."
The Biden administration's highly anticipated announcement follows a related lawsuit filed Tuesday by the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), whose director, Abed Ayoub, said Wednesday that "by endorsing a tiered system for U.S. citizens, our government has given its tacit approval to Israel's prejudiced policies and apartheid actions."
Especially faced with what is widely considered Israel's most far-right government in the nation's history—reaffirmed by stunts like Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu presenting a map of "The New Middle East" without Palestine during a speech to the United Nations General Assembly last week—a growing number of rights groups have accused Israel of apartheid.
Adalah Justice Project executive director Sandra Tamari declared Wednesday that "apartheid is not only Israeli policy, it is U.S. policy too."
"Israel's discrimination is especially egregious against Palestinian Americans with ties to Gaza," Tamari stressed, "making reunification of families torn apart by Israel's siege and blockade of Gaza near impossible."
Leaders from Americans for Justice in Palestine Action, American Muslims for Palestine, Council on American Islamic Relations, Jewish Voice for Peace Action (JVP Action), Muslim Public Affairs Council, the Jerusalem Fund for Education and Community Development, and the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights also denounced the Biden administration's designation.
JVP Action executive director Stefanie Fox called it "an outrageous endorsement of the Israeli government's systematic discrimination against Palestinian Americans and a reward to the most extremist, racist government in Israel's history."
"Once again, the U.S. is singling out Israel for special and exceptionalized treatment at the expense of the rights of Palestinian Americans," she added. "Jewish Voice for Peace Action calls for the immediate reversal of this decision."
James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, suggested that "by choosing to make this reckless move ahead of the September 30, 2023 end of the federal fiscal year, it is also clear the issue of reciprocity was not the only barrier to Israel's eligibility to enter the VWP."
"Moving to admit them now so that an application would not have to restart under potentially different (and post-Covid) visa refusal rates—an additional requirement of the law—is another sign of the prioritization of politics over our rights," he continued. "With this move, Israel has extended its discriminatory apartheid laws to American citizens with our own government's enthusiastic support."
Democracy in the Arab World Now (DAWN) director of advocacy for Israel/Palestine Adam Shapiro, a plaintiff in ADC's lawsuit, said Wednesday that "the U.S. should halt implementation of the visa waiver for Israel at least until a judge reviews what we believe to be the government's arbitrary and capricious actions that enshrine Israeli apartheid in a U.S. program."
"Separate can never be equal, as was determined decades ago in the fight for civil rights in this country," Shapiro added. "Forty countries participate in the VWP, and none have formal arrangements to discriminate against American citizens; only Israel has demanded and been granted this unconscionable favor by the U.S. government."
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