Avril Haines

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    The Reassuring Presence of Multiple Threats

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    In April, the US director of national intelligence, Avril Haines, presented an important document produced by the nation’s intelligence community, the 2021 Annual Threat Assessment. It was designed to demonstrate that the newly inaugurated president, Joe Biden, is ready to respond to any or all of the manifold threats, fear of which has been the key to unifying the nation.

    China and Iran figure prominently, as do the Islamic State (IS) and al-Qaida. Beltway politicians will find the continuity with the fears of previous administrations reassuring. Even though the last three — the Islamic Republic of Iran, IS and al-Qaida — would not even exist today had the United States not actively provoked them into existence through its obsessive meddling in Middle Eastern affairs, many will be pleased to note that their confirmed presence on the list continues to justify the intelligence community’s ever-expanding scope. China, of course, is a special case because it has never threatened the US militarily or economically. Yet the headline of a New York Times article on the report reads, “China Poses Biggest Threat to U.S., Intelligence Report Says.”

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    How indeed should we understand the Chinese threat, announced as the biggest of them all? Haines explains that China is guilty of “employing a comprehensive approach to demonstrate its growing strength.” The Chinese leadership has apparently failed to understand that only one nation in the world is authorized to “demonstrate its growing strength.” They should accept that it is madness to think there may be a need for China’s strength to increase. If the Chinese simply allow the US to govern the world’s affairs, they can be assured that they will always be in safe, democratic hands.

    Russia predictably appears in the full list of threats, although Haines admits that it “does not want a conflict with the United States.” That may be so, but everyone who has paid the slightest attention to the verities associated with Russiagate should now realize that Vladimir Putin’s cronies or lackies have developed a quasi-nuclear capacity to publish misinformation on Facebook, a reprehensible act that no other nation, party or person would ever think of doing. It appears that such practice can be fatal for democracy, even leading to the corrupting of an American election, the pristine model of transparent democratic procedure. 

    Haines focuses on Russia’s use of “malign influence campaigns.” This apparently means cherry-picking only negative things to say about the United States, whether factual or invented. Haines recycles the favorite trope of Russiagate enthusiasts over the past five years when she speaks of Russia’s intent to “sow discord.” Whenever Americans don’t agree on some fundamental things about their own country, the Russians must have had something to do with it.

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    Haines gets to the end of her list without mention one nation some people find profoundly disturbing: Saudi Arabia, known for its extremely repressive social practices, its summary justice against anyone suspected of “sowing discord” (which may even include Washington Post journalists) and its brutal military campaigns designed to produce the world’s worst humanitarian disasters. But for the fact of its special relationship with the US based on oil and money, there might be some merit in considering Saudi as a possible threat, especially after the 2019 shooting of three Americans by a Saudi officer in Pensacola, Florida and the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.

    New evidence emerged this week concerning the training in the US of Khashoggi’s murderers. It revealed a suspicious level of complicity between the Saudi regime, which has funded terrorism for decades, and the US State Department, which authorized the educational collaboration. When asked for comment, State Department spokesman Ned Price explained: “This administration insists on responsible use of U.S. origin defense equipment and training by our allies and partners, and considers appropriate responses if violations occur. Saudi Arabia faces significant threats to its territory, and we are committed to working together to help Riyadh strengthen its defenses.”

    Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

    Significant threats:

    For the US government, any person, group, nation or even abstract idea that in any way challenges the global network of bulwarks and bastions, weapons and sanctions that constitute a body of resources dedicated to national defense, equally including the regimes of sanguinary dictators, predatory businesses and the actions of irresponsible mercenaries, all of whom are guided by the democratic ideals that drive such policies and actions

    Contextual Note

    The twin concepts of threat (the action of others) and defense (our actions) sum up the logic of the security state. So long as a threat exists — and the more that can be listed the merrier — the system of defense can thrive and grow. Haines calls the money spent on defense and surveillance an investment, which most experts on Wall Street and any true economist might find slightly abusive. Here is how she describes the value of the intelligence assessment of threats: “In short, at no point has it been more important to invest in our norms and institutions, our workforce, and the integration of our work. Doing so, provides us with the opportunity to meet the challenges we face, to pull together as a society, and to promote resilience and innovation.” Investment, in this sense, simply means more money that the US can spend, basically on creating or entertaining fear.

    Fomenting fear is easy, especially if you have the means (unlimited budget) of making it appear serious, detailed and scientific. Interestingly, in her quest for thoroughness, Haines correctly designates climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic as major threats. Everyone already knows the threat is real. Rather than using her platform to trumpet what everyone knows, it might be more productive to look at mobilizing resources to confront such threats. She could, for example, have signaled the urgency of finding ways to allow the developing world to produce its own vaccines rather than beg for Western handouts. But that would raise the delicate question of pharmaceutical patents, which must be protected even at the cost of the world’s health. Instead, the threat she chooses to highlight is the “vaccine diplomacy” of Russia and China.

    As for climate change, Haines highlights the grim perspective for the globe itself and especially for “vulnerable populations.” But there is nary a word about the contributing causes or the prospect for possible solutions, such as calling into question the economic system that feeds the crisis. This in spite of Haines’ insistence that the intelligence agencies are not simply Cassandras, put in place to strike fear into brave citizens’ hearts, but have a positive role to play. “The American people should know as much as possible about the threats facing our nation and what their intelligence agencies are doing to protect them,” she says. It would be nice to learn more about the “doing” part of it.

    Historical Note

    Since the Second World War, the entire pattern for economic success and industrial growth has been structured around the notion of fear. The Cold War officialized fear as the major motivating factor serving to keep capitalism intact, essentially by transforming free market capitalism into monopolistically structured state capitalism (privatized socialism), in which the needs of defense drive innovation. In the first half of the 20th century, free market capitalism had begun to reveal all the contradictions Karl Marx predicted for it. After the Wall Street crash in 1929, capitalism was on the brink of collapse in the US, which also happened to be the nation that controlled the debt of the European nations who had spent all their capitalistic resources in a catastrophic world war.

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    During the 1930s, Nazism and Soviet communism, two brands of militaristic totalitarianism, became the principal objects of fear for Americans. The business class feared the communists and the working class, decimated by capitalism’s failure, feared the fascists. The Nazis emerged as the threat that justified the war effort. Once that was successful, Washington’s elite elected the Russian communists to play the role.

    After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, Islamist terrorism eventually slid into the role of existential threat number one. But the policies mobilized to defeat it had the effect of seriously weakening the American system of state capitalism. With things becoming desperate, new threats were needed. Avril Haines and the Biden administration have produced the updated catalog.

    *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Avril Haines's unusual backstory makes her an unlikely chief of US intelligence

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      Avril Haines, who now oversees all 16 US intelligence agencies, is unlike any of the spies who came before her, and not just because she is the country’s first female director of national intelligence.She is also the first intelligence chief to have to make an emergency landing while trying to cross the Atlantic in a tiny plane; the first to take a year out in Japan to learn judo; and surely the first anywhere in the world to have owned a cafe-bookstore that staged frequent erotica nights.“What’s interesting about Avril is that she’s just a voraciously curious person who will throw herself into whatever she’s doing,” said Ben Rhodes, Barack Obama’s former speechwriter and foreign policy aide who is a close friend of Haines.The Haines backstory makes her an unlikely spy, but proved no obstacle to getting bipartisan support. She was the first Biden nominee to be confirmed, with 84-10 Senate vote on Wednesday night.David Priess, a former CIA official now chief operating officer at the Lawfare Institute, said her unusual life story is an advantage in the world of espionage.“She has to be able to understand and to lead everyone from analysts to intelligence collectors to engineers to pilots to disguise artists to accountants,” Priess said.“Having that diverse set of experiences very much helps her to lead the very diverse and disparate intelligence community.”Haines’ period of lifestyle experimentation anyway ended decades ago, in 1998 when she started a law degree. Since then she has been a legal counsel in the Senate, state department and White House, the deputy director of the CIA and deputy national security adviser.Senate Republicans, who had confirmed her Trump-appointed predecessor, John Ratcliffe, despite his lack of any significant experience in intelligence and his exaggeration of his previous brushes with security work, had few excuses to oppose her.The main source of scepticism comes from human rights activists, over whether she might be too much of an insider, with too much baggage. She redacted the report on torture – some argue over-redacted it – and she codified a set of procedures and rules for the use of drone strikes in the assassinations of terror suspects.Early lifeThere is little in Haines’ early life to suggest a trajectory towards national security and intelligence. She grew up in an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, the daughter of a biochemist, Thomas Haines and a painter, Adrian Rappin. Rappin fell seriously ill with lung disease when Avril was 12, and she spent four of her early teenage years as her mother’s principal carer until her death in 1985.According to an account in Newsweek, the family was forced to give up their apartment under the relentless pressure of medical costs, and had to move around the homes of friends and relatives. By the time she left high school, the teenage Haines was so spent, she deferred college for a year and instead went to study judo at Tokyo’s Kodokan Institute, where she rose to a brown beltOn her return to the US, she studied theoretical physics at the University of Chicago and to help make ends meet, worked as a car mechanic, rebuilding car engines, and while at university, she was knocked off her bicycle by a car and left with a serious injury that continues to dog her.Undeterred, she plunged into her next dream project, restoring a second-hand plane and flying it to Europe. With her flight instructor she found a 1961 Cessna and rebuilt its navigation, communication and other electronic systems, before taking off from Bangor, Maine, with long-distance fuel tanks strapped to the fuselage.Not long into the flight, however, the Cessna began to take on ice and then both engines stopped. They had to glide low over the Labrador Sea, and were lucky to find a small airfield on the Newfoundland coast, where they made an emergency landing, and where they looked after for a week in the local community until the weather improved. Haines’ friends confirmed they believed the Newsweek account of the adventure to be accurate.One upshot of the failed adventure was that Haines married her instructor, David Davighi. They moved to Baltimore, and though the initial plan was for her to go back to school and for him to work as a pilot, another inspiration took them in a different direction entirely.They saw a newspaper advertisement for a bar-brothel that had been seized in a drugs raid and was being auctioned off. They bought it, selling the Cessna and going into debt to refashion it as Adrian’s Book Café, in honour of Haines’ mother.In Fells Point, a formerly dodgy area of Baltimore that was gentrifying, the shop succeeded, through hard work and innovations like erotic literature evenings upstairs in the former brothel, where Haines would read extracts.She defined the genre to the Baltimore Sun in 1995 as as “everything that’s repressed, guttural, instinctual, chaotic and creative.”“Erotica has become more prevalent because people are trying to have sex without having sex,” Haines said. “Others are trying to find new fantasies to make their monogamous relationships more satisfying … What the erotic offers is spontaneity, twists and turns. And it affects everyone.”Change of directionThe bank offered more launches to expand the franchise but by then, Haines had changed direction again. Community organising had got her interested in the law and in 1998 she enrolled at Georgetown University, where she came to specialise in human rights and international law.To Haines’ detractors, those were ironic choices in light of her later associations with two of the biggest stains on the US record after 9/11: torture and drones.Much of her work in the Obama national security council involved writing up a “playbook” which codified criteria for drone strikes, which the administration relied on increasingly to target leading members of terrorist groups.Her former colleagues however, insist that Haines played an important role in limiting the use of drones, challenging top officials in the Obama administration to prove that a target represented a genuine threat.“Avril really spearheaded the efforts that impose limits on the use of drones, the standard for avoiding civilian casualties, a more controlled process for determining who could be targeted,” Rhodes said.“Many people didn’t want those rules written down, because they thought by specifying things that would limit their options,” another former senior official, who did not want to be named, said. “I’ve seen her speak to power over and over and over again, in situations where I’ve seen many other people chicken out.”Obama administrationThere are other criticisms of Haines’ tenure as deputy CIA director. She arrived in 2013 when the Obama administration was still bogged down in dealing with the aftermath of its predecessor’s use of torture against terror suspects.In 2015, Haines had to decide what to do about CIA officials who had hacked into the computers of Senate intelligence committee staffers who had been compiling a comprehensive report on torture, and even drummed up spurious criminal cases against them. She overrode the advice of the CIA inspector general and recommended against disciplinary action.“No one was held accountable for that and Haines apparently thinks that is an okay resolution to the matter,” Daniel Jones, the Senate report’s lead author who was one of the targets of the CIA reprisals. “Many people have nothing but great things to say about her, but that is a massive blind spot which is kind of unforgivable.”When the Senate report by Jones and his team was finished, it was Haines who had the job of redacting it. By the time she was done, only 525 pages of the 6,700 total were released.“When Obama came into office he signed an executive order that explicitly stated that you could not classify information that was simply embarrassing,” Jones said. “I feel strongly that she advocated for redactions that were not consistent with Obama’s executive order.”Haines’ role in the torture report, on the other hand, has probably strengthened her standing in the intelligence community, where she might otherwise be viewed as an outsider without experience in the field.What counts even more though, is her previous relationship with the president, something none of her predecessors had. That alone could make her one of the more powerful directors of national intelligence.“I was in the PDB [president’s daily brief] every morning with her for the last couple of years [of the Obama administration] when she was deputy national security adviser, and so was Biden,” Rhodes said. “Presumably now as DNI, she could be the person briefing Biden every morning on intelligence matters.” More