The Daily Background

Knight Ridder has a brief article on yesterday’s events:

With the public and politicians on both sides of the aisle growing increasingly alarmed at the Bush administration’s domestic surveillance and data-mining program, the Senate confirmation hearing of the man who ran those activities for the National Security Agency attracted an overflow crowd Thursday.

It was largely a crowd of insiders. A middle-aged woman sat with a friend in the audience, fanning herself with a piece of cardboard that said: “Defeat the war on terror. Create friends, not war.” They politely applauded a few of the Democrats’ questions.

[…]
If the job of CIA director requires the ability to answer hours of sharp questions and not actually say much, Hayden passed a critical test.

As the morning session wound down, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., wanted some answers from the career military intelligence man nominated by President Bush to replace Porter Goss.

What did Hayden think about “water boarding,” the dunking of terror suspects to speed their cooperation?

He replied that he’d be happy to talk about that - in a closed session.

Does he agree that detainees might be kept for decades without trial?

Again, he said, only in closed session.

“He didn’t answer any of them,” Feinstein huffed.

So far, it’s been pretty much the usual. Democrats ask some valid questions, and the nominee either says that he’ll answer in closed session or he won’t answer at all. I dunno about you, but the idea that somehow the public cannot be trusted with the knoweldge of whether or not a man who may be the head of the CIA is opposed to torture (”waterboarding” in this case) or not is kind of scary.

As I’ve said before, convetnional wisdom is that he’ll be confirmed. It may get interesting depending on what Specter chooses to do next week regarding the nomination. There are plenty of negatives among Republicans, but a lot of them aren’t in the right positions to make a difference on this one, for instance House Speaker Denis Hasert, who opposes Hayden’s nomination for reasons that now seem to be connected to his close friendship with Porter Goss, whose firing Hasert seems to be bitter about.

I’ve said that conventional wisdom is that Hayden will be confirmed. Yesterday was just the Senate Intelligence Committee, so we’ll see what happens in the full Senate though. Full article.

Filed under: Hayden, Z-TDB Blog