The Conscience of a Biden Liberal During Gaza

Edited by Sam Thielman

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 IN THE SUMMER OF 2020, I profiled Avril Haines, who was among the most liberal members of Barack Obama's "national security" team, as she prepared for a big role in the then-hypothetical Joe Biden administration. 

Under Obama, Haines had distinguished herself through two seemingly contradictory patterns of behavior. On the one hand, she was the leading force within the Obama team for restraining drone strikes, and later in her tenure also labored to increase refugee admissions during the first wave of nativist backlash to the War on Terror-unleashed refugee flow. On the other, she helped censor the Senate report about CIA torture, and then let CIA officials who spied on their Senate overseers off the hook. 

I say her behavior seemingly contradicts itself because Haines is an example of a liberal who enters the national-security apparatus and reconciles those contradictions to themself. They wrap lawless operations in a belt of procedure and unveil them as transformed into lawful operations, a responsible alternative to the recklessness of the operations' conservative originators. In this manner they legitimate practices that kill people's grandmothers. After having legitimized such operations, it's easier to come to the defense of institutions that perform them, even when those institutions are full of torturers and willing to spy on their constitutional overseers to protect those torturers. My piece was less about Haines herself than it was about what she represented, and about the difference between restraining the War on Terror and abolishing it. 

Haines didn't argue with me when I interviewed her. She was thoughtful, speaking softly and deliberately. I couldn't tell if this is how she is—people told me she wasn't comfortable talking to journalists, and I can understand that—or if it was a strategy for defanging me. Either way, she made it clear she understood the moral considerations at the heart of my piece. Here's the quote that I used for my kicker, with a bit of setup to contextualize it: 

The leftmost Obama alumni want the Biden team to listen to [left-wing foreign-policy] dissatisfaction and translate it into policy. "The main takeaway from this controversy is that the Biden campaign ought to reach out to progressives and hear them out on matters of foreign policy as much as it does on domestic social and economic matters,” said Rob Malley, president of the International Crisis Group and Haines’ former colleague on the NSC. 

Haines said that’s what she wants as well. 

“Yes, I’m absolutely open to it. There’s no question. What the Bush administration called the global war on terror and what the Obama Administration called the conflict with al Qaeda and associated forces, cannot simply exist forever on automatic,” she told The Daily Beast. “To the extent the concern would be ‘Is she somebody who represents just a return to the policies of the Obama administration, simply promoting constraint but not actually changing the landscape,’ that’s not a concern with me. We have to rethink things.”

Shall we check in with Avril Haines, since elevated to Biden's director of national intelligence, one of the most powerful positions within the U.S. national security apparatus*? Has she rethought things? Have those rethinkings changed the landscape? Or has she instead been a cog in the machine of a genocide while perhaps feeling a bit bad about that? 

THAT'S A SPOILER for my friend and former Daily Beast colleague Erin Banco's excellent profile of Haines, which Politico's magazine published on Tuesday. Banco, for my money one of the best D.C. reporters working in this space, had a series of conversations with Haines over the past year. The piece she produces captures a senior official on the verge of considering her time in government futile, even harmful. This is a representative quote Haines gives Banco:

“I’m cynical enough to realize that it is very easy to think you are making something better — perhaps particularly in government work,” Haines said in one of our interviews, “and it turns out, you are not improving the situation; you might even have made it worse.”

You can just about see the ghosts of Palestinian children turning to the camera and staring, eternally. 

Banco's piece, which I strongly encourage you to read—just as a matter of craft alone, it's top-tier, simultaneously vivid and thorough—excavates and contextualizes Haines' career choices. Banco digs through unexpected sources like Haines' father's memoir and finds indications that Haines understood the Palestinian struggle from a young age. But there is an enormous difference between understanding something and acting on that understanding. And that, I submit, speaks to the difference between liberal and leftist approaches to U.S. foreign policy that I was getting at in my 2020 profile. 

Haines is an exemplary liberal and is naturally a lawyer. She does not wish to insert her perspective into the decision-making process, particularly as an intelligence director (although she also told me this about her non-intelligence jobs), because of her devotion to the integrity of that process. But that process has led to the deaths of at least 43,000 Palestinians as of the latest count, not including however many lie buried in the rubble created by U.S.-provided weapons, or the tens if not hundreds of thousands who will die from preventable starvation and disease; the ethnic cleansing of still-living people from Northern Gaza; a new Israeli invasion of Lebanon that has killed hundreds and displaced hundreds of thousands while tearing at the already-rent Lebanese social fabric; and a regional war that continues to escalate. A lot of people had to die before Avril Haines could approach the threshold of moral reckoning. Every day adds fresh corpses to the pile. And every day is another opportunity for her, in her power, to do something about it. 

Yesterday, after the Israeli Knesset restricted the ability of UNRWA to operate on behalf of Palestinians—and remember that UNRWA fills a governance/services vacuum in the occupied Palestinian territories as well as being a relief agency—Commissioner Philippe Lazzarini spoke of the move "sabotag[ing] any chance of recovery" of Gaza. That is of course the point, at least for starters. Lazzarini used language stronger and less diplomatic than I can recall hearing from any U.N. official, even in the wake of Srebrenica in 1995. Look at this: 

Today, even as we look into the faces of children in Gaza, some of whom we know will die tomorrow, the rules-based international order is crumbling in a repetition of the horrors that led to the establishment of the United Nations, and in violation of commitments to prevent their recurrence. 

Haines spends a great deal of time in Banco's piece musing about whether, in Erin's paraphrase, "the strict compartmentalization of her professional obligations and her personal ethics in government work is accomplishing the good she once thought it could." Well, when you're a senior official of the regnant hegemon and don't preserve the lives or the basic dignity of millions of people facing an existential threat from a U.S. ally using U.S. weapons, guess what: You sure won't accomplish anything good. In such cases, your "personal ethics in government" are not violated. They are, alas, revealed. 

Avril Haines is not a detached observer grappling with difficult questions as a measure of her probity. She directs an intelligence apparatus that aids the Israeli military in carrying out its operations. Other people at lower levels have quit over that. As they've quit, they've noted how deep the U.S. national-security apparatus' visibility is in Gaza. 

Haines speaks in Banco's piece like the work of the decent cannot be accomplished in power. "If I could contribute to a more ethical society, then I would be doing something to improve our discourse, decision-making and ultimately enhancing the quality of our lives," she says. "I very much hope I can make such a contribution in the next phase of my professional life." 

I think my book demonstrates that I have few illusions about the Security State and the horrors that occur when the Security State interacts with the political aspects of the U.S. empire. Yet I have to insist that perspectives like what I take Haines’ to be are just bullshit—pure cop-outs that shrug off the responsibilities of power to the people who stare down its barrel. 

Haines could have been Philippe Lazzarini. Yes, yes, a U.N. commissioner does not have the same relationship to power as a U.S. director of national intelligence. But look at what Philippe Lazzarini does with the power he has. Listen to how he sounds when he encounters limits Israel imposed upon his power. He does not sound abstract notes about ethics. He says children will not be alive tomorrow. If Philippe Lazzarini was speaking about atrocities committed by a U.S. adversary instead of by an ally enjoying the full material and diplomatic backing of Washington, Samantha Power would write a book about his valiant, heroic example. 

If Haines thinks she can do more good outside of government service, well, she'll have a low bar to clear. But she is the one who placed her bar on the floor. (And last time she was out of government, the greater good she accomplished was… working for the West Exec Advisors firm and consulting for Palantir.) Others on the outside will instead wonder why they should listen to someone who facilitated a genocide in Palestine. And they might not have the patience to consider the deep ethical dilemmas such a person felt when the weight of governance was heavy on their shoulders. 

*I don't want to hear any "but the DNI doesn't control intelligence-agency budgets" objections. The DNI is a position that creates a layer of presidential control atop the intelligence agencies, contrasting sharply with the previous arrangement for the top intelligence official. In that prior case, the CIA director answered to both the CIA and the White House. The DNI answers only to the White House. 

YOU CAN TRULY SEE THE COWARDICE OF RACISM on display when the right-wing pundit who told Mehdi Hasan to watch out for his beeper immediately backs down upon being challenged for issuing such a casual slur-incitement combo. This was real REIGN OF TERROR stuff happening on live TV. Is it worse if CNN didn't do any due diligence about this person or if it did?

RAYTHEON HAS AGREED TO PAY AN EYE-WATERING $950 MILLION after being caught defrauding the Defense Department and trying to bribe a Qatari national. That really is an astronomical figure to pay back—until you consider that it's a drop in the bucket of the $19.72 billion in revenue Raytheon announced in what I think is its most recent quarterly report. [Former biz reporter weighing in: Yes, that is $19.72bn for the quarter. Annual revenue will probably be just south of $80bn—Sam.] As such, fines incurred by committing fraud on this scale simply have to be considered part of Raytheon's military-industrial business model. Sometimes you gotta go in for nearly a billion to Uncle Sam if you wanna get to nearly $20 billion in revenue [In three months!] from Uncle Sugar. 

WALLER VS. WILDSTORM, the superhero spy thriller I co-wrote with my friend Evan Narcisse and which the masterful Jesús Merino illustrated, is available for purchase in a hardcover edition! If you don't have single issues of WVW and you want a four-issue set signed by me, they're going fast at Bulletproof Comics! 

No one is prouder of WVW than her older sibling, REIGN OF TERROR: HOW THE 9/11 ERA DESTABILIZED AMERICA AND PRODUCED TRUMP, which is available now in hardcover, softcover, audiobook and Kindle edition. And on the way is a new addition to the family: THE TORTURE AND DELIVERANCE OF MAJID KHAN.