Cabinet picks ‘undo decades of progress’
Rights activists have condemned Donald Trump for three cabinet appointments they say could ‘‘undo decades of progress’’ towards racial equality and effectively legitimise the use of torture.
The United States presidentelect yesterday picked Senator Jeff Sessions as attorney general, Representative Mike Pompeo as director of the CIA, and retired lieutenant-general Michael Flynn as national security adviser.
The hawkish trio have made inflammatory statements about race relations, immigration, Islam and the use of torture, and signal a provocative shift of the national security apparatus to the Right.
Sessions, a 69-year-old senator from Alabama, a state with a tormented history of segregation, has been accused of racist comments in the past. He will succeed two African-Americans – Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch – who served under Barack Obama.
Sessions, who has emphasised ‘‘law and order’’, seen by some liberals as a coded phrase for discriminatory policing of minorities, would have huge power as head of the Department of Justice, grappling with issues such as police shootings of African-Americans, as well as whether Trump’s defeated election opponent Hillary Clinton should face criminal prosecution over her mishandling information.
Civil rights campaigners were quick to criticise his selection.
Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People’s (NAACP) Legal Defence Fund, said: ‘‘Jeff Sessions has a decades-long record – from his early days as a prosecutor to his present role as a of classified senator – of opposing civil rights and equality. It is unimaginable that he could be entrusted to serve as the chief law enforcement officer for this nation’s civil rights laws.’’
Sessions’ last confirmation hearing, for a federal judgeship under President Ronald Reagan in 1986, was derailed when former colleagues testified that he used the N-word, called a black assistant US attorney ‘‘boy’’, and joked that the Ku Klux Klan was ‘‘OK until I found out they smoked pot’’. He was also alleged to have called the NAACP and the American Civil Liberties Union ‘‘unAmerican, communist-inspired organisations’’.
Pompeo, 52, a third-term congressman from Kansas, was a surprise choice to lead the CIA. Elected to Congress as part of the 2010 Tea Party wave, he has enjoyed a quick rise, thanks in part to his penchant for incendiary statements about national security. After the Boston Marathon bombings in 2013, he falsely claimed that US Muslim organisations and religious leaders had not condemned terrorism.
After the 2014 release of a landmark Senate report into CIA torture, Pompeo called those at the CIA who participated in torture ‘‘heroes, not pawns in some liberal game’’.
Flynn, 57, a retired US amy three-star general and one of Trump’s closest advisers, was fired from the Defence Intelligence Agency in 2014 – he has claimed this was because he told hard truths about the war on Islamist extremism.
Sarah Margon, Washington director of Human Rights Watch, said: ‘‘Michael Flynn has shown a stunning contempt for the Geneva Conventions and other laws prohibiting torture.’’