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Gina Haspel Sworn In As First Woman CIA Director Despite Torture Claims

Agencies
May 22, 2018

Washington, May 22:  As he participated in the swearing-in of his new CIA director on Monday, President Donald Trump acknowledged the difficulties that Gina Haspel's nomination had faced but said her strong performance at her confirmation hearing turned things around.

"It took courage for her to say 'yes' in the face of a lot of very negative politics and what was supposed to be a negative vote," Trump said at a ceremony at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. "But I'll tell you, when you testified before the committee, it was over. There was not much they could say."

The Senate voted Thursday to confirm Haspel's nomination, 54 to 45, despite lingering concerns about the role she played in the brutal interrogation of suspected terroristscaptured after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Haspel, who succeeds Mike Pompeo, Trump's new secretary of state, is the first woman to lead the CIA. Trump noted the milestone in his remarks, adding: "That's big."

Trump praised Haspel, who rose through the ranks at the CIA, as "someone who has served this agency with extraordinary skill and devotion" for 30 years.

"Our enemies will take note," Trump said. "Gina is tough, she is strong, and when it comes to defending America, Gina will never, ever back down."

Trump had wavered in his backing for Haspel, at times expressing doubt in private meetings about whether she had the support to win confirmation, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Earlier this month, Haspel sought to withdraw after some White House officials worried that her involvement in the CIA's interrogation program could derail her chances.

Trump decided to push for Haspel to stay in the running, after first signaling he would support whatever decision she made, administration officials said.

In late 2002, Haspel, then a senior leader at the Counterterrorism Center, managed a secret detention facility in Thailand where two al-Qaida suspects were waterboarded (one of them before Haspel's arrival).

During her confirmation hearing, Haspel insisted she would never allow torture at the CIA again, and she said she would be guided in the future by her own "moral compass." But she resolutely avoided saying whether, at the time, she thought the secret detention and "enhanced interrogation" of suspected terrorists was moral.

From the moment she was nominated to succeed Pompeo, Haspel had faced major confirmation hurdles. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., announced from the outset that he would oppose her, while she faced deep skepticism from Democrats and other Republicans for her role in the enhanced interrogation program during the administration of George W. Bush.

Haspel, however, sailed through her confirmation hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee without any major slip-ups, and former defense and intelligence officials under the Obama administration mounted a campaign to persuade swing Democratic votes.

On Thursday, six Democratic senators supported her nomination, and two Republicans voted against her - Paul and Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake.

During remarks after she was sworn in Monday by Vice President Mike Pence, Haspel noted that "it has been nearly 50 years since an operations officer rose up through the ranks" to become CIA director.

After her two-month-long confirmation battle, Haspel added: "I think I know why that is."

"I want each of you to know that I took on the position of director because I want to represent you, as well as lead you," Haspel said to CIA employees present at the ceremony. "I want the current CIA leadership team to be role models and mentors for our next generation of officers."

Former senior intelligence officials attended the swearing-in ceremony, but former CIA Director John Brennan was not invited, according to people familiar with the matter. Brennan, who led the agency during President Barack Obama's administration, has become a fierce and vocal critic of Trump, accusing him of behavior that he recently characterized as "self-serving" and dangerous to democracy.

In various tweets in recent weeks, Brennan has called Trump a hypocrite and a liar. On Sunday, Brennan called on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., to prevent the president from ordering a Justice Department investigation into the probe of his presidential campaign's contacts with Russia.

"If Mr. Trump continues along this disastrous path, you will bear major responsibility for the harm done to our democracy," Brennan wrote in a tweet.

On Monday morning, Trump, in an apparent response, alleged that Brennan had orchestrated the Russia investigation as a "political hit job" against the president. (There is no evidence that Brennan was the source of the investigation.) Trump was quoting Dan Bongino, a former U.S. Secret Service agent and frequent Fox News commentator.

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Agencies
August 5,2020

Ninety per cent of a sample group of coronavirus-recovered patients from a prominent hospital in China's Wuhan city where the pandemic broke out have reported lung damage and five per cent of them are again in quarantine after testing positive for the virus, according to a media report on Wednesday.

A team at the Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University led by Peng Zhiyong, director of the hospital's Intensive Care Unit, has been conducting follow-up visits with '100 recovered patients' since April.

The first phase of this one-year programme finished in July. The average age of the patients in the study is 59.

According to the first phase results, 90 per cent of the patients' lungs are still in a damaged state, which means their lungs ventilation and gas exchange functions have not recovered to the level of healthy people, state-run Global Times reported.

Peng's team conducted a six-minute walking test with the patients. They found that the recovered patients could only walk 400 metres in six minutes while their healthy peers could walk 500 metres in the same period.

Some recovered patients have to rely on oxygen machines even three months after being discharged from the hospital, Liang Tengxiao, a doctor from the Dongzhimen Hospital, Beijing University of Chinese Medicine, was quoted as saying by the report.

Liang's team is also conducting follow-up visits with recovered patients aged above 65.

The results also showed that antibodies against the novel coronavirus in 10 per cent of the 100 patients have disappeared.

Five per cent of them received negative results in Covid-19 nucleic acid tests but positive results in Immunoglobulin M (IgM) tests, and thus have to be quarantined again, the report said.

IgM is usually the first antibody produced by the immune system when a virus attacks. A positive result in an IgM test usually means that a person has just been infected by the virus.

It is still unclear if this means these people have been infected again.

The 100 patients' immune systems have not fully recovered as they showed a low level of B cells -- - a primary force for killing viruses in the human body -- but a high level of T cells which only recognise viral antigens outside infected cells.

"The results revealed that the patients’ immune systems are still recovering," Peng said.

The patients also suffered from depression and a sense of stigma. Most of the recovered patients told the team that their families were not willing to have dinner with them at the same table, the report said.

Less than half of the recovered patients have returned to work, it said.

The findings are significant as the coronavirus first emerged in Wuhan city.

Hubei province for which Wuhan is the provincial capital has reported a total of 68,138 confirmed Covid-19 cases till now. The disease has claimed 4,512 lives in the province, according to the official data.

China reported 27 new confirmed Covid-19 cases on Tuesday, including 22 locally-transmitted cases, the National Health Commission (NHC) said on Wednesday.

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News Network
March 28,2020

Washington, Mar 28: A US-based lab has unveiled a portable test that can tell if someone has COVID-19 in as little as five minutes, it said in a statement Friday.

Abbot Laboratories said the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had given it emergency authorization to begin making the test available to healthcare providers as early as next week.

The test, which is the size of a small toaster and uses molecular technology, also shows negative results within 13 minutes, the company said in a press statement.

"The COVID-19 pandemic will be fought on multiple fronts, and a portable molecular test that offers results in minutes adds to the broad range of diagnostic solutions needed to combat this virus," said Abbot president and chief operating officer Robert Ford.

The test's small size means it can be deployed outside the "traditional four walls of a hospital in outbreak hotspots," Ford said, and Abbott is working with the FDA to send it to virus epicenters.

The test has not been cleared or approved by the FDA, and has only been authorized for emergency use by approved labs and healthcare providers, the company said.

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News Network
June 13,2020

Jun 13: Requiring the wearing of masks to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus in areas at the epicenter of the global pandemic may have prevented tens of thousands of infections, a new study suggests.

Mask-wearing is even more important for preventing the virus' spread and the sometimes deadly COVID-19 illness it causes than social distancing and stay-at-home orders, researchers said, in the study published in PNAS: The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA.

Infection trends shifted dramatically when mask-wearing rules were implemented on April 6 in northern Italy and April 17 in New York City - at the time among the hardest hit areas of the world by the health crisis - the study found.

"This protective measure alone significantly reduced the number of infections, that is, by over 78,000 in Italy from April 6 to May 9 and over 66,000 in New York City from April 17 to May 9," researchers calculated.

When mask-wearing went into effect in New York, the daily new infection rate fell by about 3% per day, researchers said. In the rest of the country, daily new infections continued to increase.

Direct contact precautions - social distancing, quarantine and isolation, and hand sanitizing - were all in place before mask-wearing rules went into effect in Italy and New York City. But they only help minimize virus transmission by direct contact, while face covering helps prevent airborne transmission, the researchers say.

"The unique function of face covering to block atomization and inhalation of virus-bearing aerosols accounts for the significantly reduced infections," they said. That would indicate "that airborne transmission of COVID-19 represents the dominant route for infection."

The U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday urged organizers of large gatherings that involve "shouting, chanting or singing to strongly encourage the use of cloth face coverings to lower the risk of spreading the coronavirus."

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