comments It was painful enough to live through the U.S invasion of Iraq that caused untold devastation and human misery for no justifiable reason. Now we are again reminded of the grim legacy of the George W. Bush administration with President-elect Biden's nomination of Avril Haines as director of national intelligence. Haines, who has an inside-the-Beltway reputation for being nice and soft-spoken, was a little too nice to CIA agents who hacked into the computers of Senate Intelligence Committee investigators looking into the CIA use of torture — waterboarding, sleep deprivation, hypothermia, rectal feeding, whippings, sexual humiliation — at Guantánamo Bay and Afghan prisons during the Bush-era "war on terror."