Torture, and Get a Promotion

This is what "Looking forward, not backward," as Obama says, is such a bad idea.

It means that deeply evil people are given the more power over the rest of us:

Today's Washington Post has a front-page article on the impending promotion of an official involved in running the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) torture program to head the CIA clandestine service. According to WaPo, the officer

helped run the CIA’s detention and interrogation program after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and signed off on the 2005 decision to destroy videotapes of prisoners being subjected to treatment critics have called torture.

WaPo reports that newly-confirmed CIA director John Brennan (who was also involved in the CIA's torture program and has since moved on to writing an assassination-without-due-process "playbook") has tapped three former senior officials to oversee the appointment of the former chief of staff to brazen torture apologist Jose Rodriguez to head the CIA's clandestine service. The group consists of John McLaughlin (CIA deputy director during the CIA's torture heyday), Stephen Kappes (another rendition, torture, and interrogation (RDI) supervisor - read about his covering up a prisoner's death here) and Mary Margaret Graham (whose problematic professional history you can read about in Steve Coll's recent New Yorker piece on CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou). Does anyone not see the problem with RDI daddy Brennan assigning RDI supervisors to promote the RDI queenpin?

BTW, she is hip deep on the coverup of torture:

When the head of the Counterterrorism Center, Jose Rodriguez, was promoted to head of the clandestine service in 2004, he took the female officer along as his chief of staff. According to former officials, the two repeatedly sought permission to have the tapes destroyed but were denied.

In 2005, instructions to get rid of the recordings went out anyway. Former officials said the order carried just two names: Rodriguez and his chief of staff.

Not only should this woman not be promoted, this woman should never hold a security clearance ever again.