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“If Haines couldn’t even oppose the appointment of a torturer as CIA director, how can she be expected to rein in American intelligence agencies’ abuses of power?” asks The Guardian.

After a detail to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee put Haines on Biden’s radar in late 2010, she moved to the White House, where she eventually chaired the interagency lawyers’ group that created the legal framework for “targeted killings”—i.e. drone strikes.

She quickly partnered with White House counterterrorism adviser and former CIA officer John Brennan.

“We wanted to make sure that the counterterrorism program and any type of lethal strikes that we might take would be very sharply caverned within a framework that made certain stipulations [and] criteria before any strike was taken,” said Brennan.

Despite the tenfold increase in drone strikes under the Obama administration, Brennan framed their roles as one of “limiting strikes.”

“Avril and I bore the scars of a lot of the pushback that we received from counterterrorism proponents that wanted to have more latitude in carrying out strikes,” he said.

“Former Obama aides have retroactively sought to cast [Haines] as a voice of restraint and protecting civilians, but this revisionism…is undeserved,”  tweeted Sarah Lazare, editor of In These Times. “Whatever supposed safeguards Haines included to limit harm to civilians, they didn’t work. The effect of the presidential policy guidance she co-authored was to turn the world into a US battlefield & normalize drone war that was, and continues to be, extremely lethal for civilians.”

Samantha Power, former ambassador to the United Nations, disagrees.

“When someone doesn’t get everything they seek inside the U.S. government, critics can say ‘that person is legitimating policy by improving it,’” said Power, “but the fact of the matter is that more innocent civilians would have died and a far wider set of targets would have been pursued without the changes that she secured.”

In op-eds strewn throughout the media, Haines has been recast as a scientist, spy chief, and supergirl, with a life like “a movie script.”

“Avril Haines’ appointment will make America — and the world — safer,” gushes CNN national security analyst Samantha Vinograd. “Her incredible background — including her love of science, flying planes and brown belt in judo — may read like a movie script, but it’s real. Among her other accomplishments, she’s a skilled lawyer, a physicist and has been described by a colleague as someone who ‘may quite literally be the nicest person any of us have ever met.’”

CNN’s write-up is notably similar to this one in the Sydney Morning Herald:

Avril Haines’ journey to the top of the national security world reads more like a movie script than the path of a woman about to make history as America’s first female spy chief. Long before President-elect Joe Biden nominated her this week to be his Director of National Intelligence, Haines mastered judo at an elite academy in Tokyo, learnt to fly planes while studying physics in Chicago and opened a bookstore in Baltimore that occasionally hosted readings of erotic literature.

“While much news coverage has dwelled on her quirky life history – she rebuilt a plane! She’s a brown belt! She owned a bookstore! – she also played a key role in overseeing the drone strike program under Obama,” points out The Guardian’s Nathan Robinson. “This should be completely disqualifying, because Obama’s use of drones was a national disgrace. There has been very little accountability or acknowledgment of how bad it was. Anyone involved with the program should have been prosecuted. Instead they’re being rewarded.”

Vinograd says that she worked with Haines during the Obama administration and that Haines won’t get political like Richard Grenell and current DNI John Ratcliffe have, in her telling.

“In the time that I worked with her, I never once heard her mention politics or party or anything of that sort,” she writes. “In the wake of Trump’s undermining of the intelligence community, Haines’ track record of apolitical public service will help her restore the soul of the intelligence community which, at its core, is supposed to speak truth to power.”

In her glowing op-ed, Vinograd omits Haines’ role in sparing CIA personnel accountability for torture and hacking Senate computers. Others are not so quick to forget. The New York Times reports that Haines “is likely to win confirmation in a sharply divided Senate but encounter hard criticisms from the left.”

The selection of Haines to lead DNI is “very” concerning, national security investigative journalist Gareth Porter told The American Conservative, and particularly if the Biden administration “continues the forever wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria  and Africa, as [I] expect it will.”

“Not only did [Haines] show an absence of ethical values in her role in the Obama White House, but she will have a powerful bureaucratic self-interest in maximizing the drone strikes, which have occupied a major share of the CIA’s staffing in the past,” he said.

Haines’ drone limits weren’t “sufficient,” and on “the torture report, she was part of an administration that was much more hostile to the Senate’s [investigation] efforts than was warranted,” said Katherine Hawkins, senior legal analyst for Project on Government Oversight, in an interview with The American Conservative. Haines “signed off on the CIA’s decision to exonerate itself for spying on and making a false criminal referral about the Senate staff….”

Biden undoubtedly chose Haines because she is a “familiar face,” points out Hawkins. The open question is whether Biden and Haines recognize that the U.S. is in a “very different moment” now, as a war-weary public faces the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Barbara Boland is TAC’s foreign policy and national security reporter. Previously, she worked as an editor for the Washington Examiner and for CNS News. She is the author of Patton Uncovered, a book about General George Patton in World War II, and her work has appeared on Fox News, The Hill,  UK Spectator, and elsewhere. Boland is a graduate from Immaculata University in Pennsylvania.  Follow her on Twitter @BBatDC.

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