Avril Haines
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Avril Haines is, per John Kiriakou, a National Security Council official who later became CIA deputy director and personally approved lethal drone strike decisions. Kiriakou says that in the drone program, a drone operator with a target in the crosshairs would call in to ask whether to launch, early on to the CIA's Counterterrorism Center or the agency's general counsel, and later, during the Obama administration, to Haines; it was Haines, Kiriakou says, "that decided whether it was legal to incinerate someone from the sky."

Kiriakou states that Haines approved the drone strikes that killed Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen who had never been charged with a crime; his teenage son; and a nephew, also American citizens, none of them afforded due process or the chance to face their accusers in court.

The lawyer on the kill list

Kiriakou's specific charge about her NSC years is a legal one: she was in charge of determining whether it was lawful or unlawful to place a given name on John Brennan's kill list, and in almost every case she found that it was, after which the people named were killed by drone.

The Senate hack, and the redactions

Haines was CIA deputy director while the agency, under Brennan, hacked into the computer systems of the Senate Intelligence Committee's Democratic staff, who were then writing the Senate torture report. Brennan wanted to know what they knew; Kiriakou's phrase is that Haines was "in up to her neck" in the hacking.

The question he most wants answered is a different one: what exactly her role was in redacting that report. What was published was a heavily blacked-out five-hundred-page version of the executive summary; a further five thousand pages have never been seen.

Confirmed without answering

Kiriakou was, in his own word, "frankly very disappointed" when Biden named her Director of National Intelligence, on the grounds that too many questions about her work at the White House and at the CIA remained open. Among them, where she stood on China, Russia, Iran, counter-proliferation and counterterrorism, matters she was never required to address in a public venue. She was confirmed 82,10 all the same. That such intelligence nominations attract bipartisan support is, for Kiriakou, part of the problem rather than a reassurance.

He sets the appointment directly against the one made the same week: that Biden could pick someone as able as Bill Burns and someone as disastrous as Haines within days of each other suggested, in his phrase, "a bit of schizophrenia within the administration."

See also

- Bill Burns
- John Brennan
- Senate torture report
- Tuesday morning kill list
- John Kiriakou
