If, as seems to be the White House’s plan, Central Intelligence Agency director Mike Pompeo is appointed to run the State Department and Rex Tillerson is booted out, Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton is widely rumored to be the top choice to take over the CIA post. Arkansas law gives the governor, currently Asa Hutchinson, a Republican, authority to replace Cotton as senator until the 2018 election. Cotton’s Senate term lasts until 2020.
He could be the worst ever pick for the CIA job, even topping Allen Dulles, the longest-serving director, who was crucial to creating an agency devoted not just to gathering intelligence, but also engineering coups against elected governments like Guatemala’s in 1954, heightening citizen surveillance, meddling in elections such as Italy’s, supporting dictators friendly to U.S. interests but enemies of their own people, and plotting assassinations of foreign leaders, including Fidel Castro.
Cotton has supported waterboarding, imprisoning journalists, and an aggressive stance against Iran that includes trashing the nuclear agreement approved in 2015 by the United States, the other four permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, Germany, and Tehran. He has also proposed repeatedly bombing Iran to wipe out its nuclear infrastructure.
After James Risen and Eric Lichtblau at The New York Times belatedly exposed secret, warrantless surveillance by the government in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, then-Army Lt. Cotton wrote a never-published letter to the newspaper from Iraq, where he was part of the occupation forces:
“I hope that my colleagues at the Department of Justice match the courage of my soldiers here and prosecute you and your newspaper to the fullest extent of the law. By the time we return home, maybe you will be in your rightful place: not at the Pulitzer announcements, but behind bars.”
Despite his Harvard credentials, Cotton was way off the mark about the legal ramifications of publishing classified material.
More recently, he wrote and got 46 Republican senators to sign a saber-rattling letter to Iran’s leaders warning them in the wake of the signing of the nuclear agreement two years ago that a new president could revoke the deal and Congress could modify it any time. Retired Major Gen. Paul D. Eaton told Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capeheart:
“What Senator Cotton did is a gross breach of discipline, and especially as a veteran of the Army, he should know better,” Eaton told me. “I have no issue with Senator Cotton, or others, voicing their opinion in opposition to any deal to halt Iran’s nuclear progress. Speaking out on these issues is clearly part of his job. But to directly engage a foreign entity, in this way, undermining the strategy and work of our diplomats and our Commander in Chief, strains the very discipline and structure that our foreign relations depend on, to succeed.”
In October, in a reckless and dangerous move, Trump accepted Cotton’s argument that the U.S. should decertify the agreement with Iran, without actually ending it. This despite the fact that all relevant sources agree Iran is complying with its requirements under the agreement. What Trump did is give Congress the chance between then and mid-December to impose new sanctions on Iran.
Spencer Ackerman, a veteran journalist on the intelligence beat, writes:
Cotton’s prospective arrival at the CIA is the latest dalliance with a restoration of torture to the spy agency’s agenda. Trump as a presidential candidate advocated “worse” torture techniques than waterboarding, only to proclaim himself swayed away from torture by the opposition of Jim Mattis, now the defense secretary. [...]
Glenn Carle, a retired CIA operations officer with interrogation experience, called Cotton “wholly unfit to be CIA director.”
“Those of us with some knowledge and objectivity have pointed out endlessly that torture does not work, is illegal, is unnecessary and harms the perpetrators of it,” Carle told The Daily Beast.
“Tom Cotton at present remains clueless about torture. He seems to base his beliefs on the efficacy of torture on B-movies and dog-eared Tom Clancy novels,” added former Navy interrogation-resistance instructor Malcolm Nance, who has been waterboarded and calls it torture.
“Unfit” seems a key requirement for becoming a Trump appointee. But as major segments of the media continue their efforts to normalize the regime of the Orange Mussolini, it seems doubtful there will be any extended outcry from most of the Fourth Estate against this horrible choice. And given the tsunami of bad shit inundating us every day, the resistance may find it difficult to come up with the bandwidth needed to fight this appointment, especially since the likelihood of success is small, at best. But this should not deter us from spending time and energy opposing Cotton.