Mike Pompeo: a great appointment, Part Two

I agree with John’s assessment that Mike Pompeo is a great appointment for CIA Director. Pompeo was a leading opponent of the Iran deal. He worked with our friend Sen. Tom Cotton to discover important secret side deals to that agreement.

Pompeo is also a proponent of detaining terrorists at Gitmo. In addition, he supported the “enhanced” interrogation methods used during the Bush administration.

Regarding CIA personnel who employed such methods to obtain information from terrorists soon after 9/11, Pompeo has said:

These men and women are not torturers, they are patriots. The programs being used were within the law. If any individual did operate outside of the program’s legal framework, I would expect them to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

Pompeo advocates expanding the federal government’s surveillance authority. He opposed limits on government surveillance imposed by the Obama administration after the Snowden leaks. And he opposed the U.S.A. Freedom Act that replaced the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of Americans’ phone records with a system in which the government has to get a court order to obtain records from phone companies.

Running the CIA is, in part, a test of administrative skill. No one confidently can predict how a new Director will perform in this respect. But Pompeo’s sound, pro-intelligence policy views, his smarts (valedictorian of his class at West Point; member of the Harvard Law Review), and his success in business, all suggest that he will succeed in this immensely important and immensely challenging position.

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