RUTHFULLY YOURS

President Trump has said he is at last assembling a Cabinet team to his liking, and late Thursday he announced that John Bolton will replace General H.R. McMaster as his National Security Adviser. It is a solid and experienced choice.

General McMaster, like others, reportedly had fallen out of favor with Mr. Trump. But there should be no doubt that General McMaster helped the President through a challenging first year, which included an array of problems inherited from the Obama Administration, not least the North Korean nuclear threat.

Mr. Bolton’s critics often accuse him of belligerence and reactive saber-rattling. He is indeed direct. No listener comes away from a conversation with John Bolton in doubt about where he stands. That must include Mr. Trump, who had Mr. Bolton under consideration to be his first Secretary of State last year and has discussed foreign issues often with him since.

The charge that Mr. Bolton can be an unguided missile misconstrues his ideas and experience. He served in the State Department during both Bush Presidencies. Under George W. Bush he created the multinational Proliferation Security Initiative in 2003, a useful effort explicitly designed to deter North Korea’s efforts to smuggle weapons materials.

Those wanting an understanding of John Bolton’s thinking on security issues should read the many essays he has written for these pages in recent years—most recently “The Legal Case for Striking North Korea First” on Feb. 28.

Mr. Bolton’s first job will be to prepare the President for an historic meeting with Kim Jong Un. We may assume Pyongyang knows now that bluffing the U.S. won’t work.

Even in the mostly egalitarian city-states of relatively poor classical Greece, the wealthy were readily identifiable. A man of privilege was easy to spot by his remarkable possession of a horse, the fine quality of his tunic, or by his mastery of Greek syntax and vocabulary.

An anonymous and irascible Athenian author—dubbed “The Old Oligarch” by the nineteenth-century British classicist Gilbert Murray—wrote a bitter diatribe known as “The Constitution of the Athenians.” The harangue, composed in the late fifth century B.C., blasted the liberal politics and culture of Athens. The grouchy elitist complained that poor people in Athens don’t get out of the way of rich people. He was angry that only in radically democratic imperial Athens was it hard to calibrate a man by his mere appearance: “You would often hit an Athenian citizen by mistake on the assumption that he was a slave. For the people there are no better dressed than the slaves and metics, nor are they any more handsome.”

The Old Oligarch’s essay reveals an ancient truth about privilege and status. Throughout history, the elite in most of the Western world were easy to distinguish. Visible class distinctions characterized ancient Rome, Renaissance Florence, the Paris of the nineteenth century, and the major cities of twentieth century America.

A variety of recent social trends and revolutionary economic breakthroughs have blurred the line separating the elite from the masses.

First, the cultural revolution of the 1960s made it cool for everyone to dress sloppily and to talk with slang and profanity. Levis, T-shirts, and sneakers became the hip American uniform, a way of superficially equalizing the unequal. Contrived informality radiated the veneer of class solidarity. Multimillionaires like Bruce Springsteen and Bono appear indistinguishable from welders on the street.

Donald Trump’s sins do not absolve you of yours.

Former CIA chief John Brennan is a liar. And he’s not the kind of garden variety dissembler that we see in Washington all the time, either. Rather, Brennan is the kind of man who feels comfortable brazenly misleading the American people about an attack on democracy, and then shamelessly lecturing them about civic decency.

You may recall, as director of the CIA, Brennan oversaw an operation of illegal spying on a staffer of the legislative branch of the United States government. At least five agency officials under his watch broke into Senate computer files, viewing drafts of a report on torture and reconstructing emails of at least one staffer. Brennan would attempt to cover up the agency’s actions by doubling down, blaming the Senate, and pushing to fire at least one staffer charged with investigating his agency.

It wasn’t until the CIA’s inspector general confirmed this wrongdoing that Brennan began negotiating with the senators about owning up to the spying (which we still don’t fully understand). Even then, however, he was lying about it to the public. When asked about the CIA hacking into Senate computers at an appearance at the Council on Foreign Relations, the intelligence chief responded that “nothing could be further from the truth. I mean we wouldn’t do that. I mean, that’s just beyond the – you know, the scope of reason in terms of what we would do.” Brennan went on to contend: “Let me assure you the CIA was in no way spying on [the committee] or the Senate.”

Gina Haspel, Trump’s pick to succeed Mike Pompeo as head of the CIA, is a thirty-year veteran of the agency, one well respected by intelligence professionals from both parties. If confirmed, she will be the first woman to run our most important security agency. But despite this feminist victory, the Dems are likely to muddy the waters at her confirmation hearings by smearing her with allegations she oversaw “torture” at a black site in Thailand in 2002. Typical of what we can expect is the New York Times editorial titled, “Having a Torturer Lead the CIA,” even as the charge about the black site was shown to be untrue.

Once again, the party bereft of ideas and principle resorts to emotional obfuscation and accusation to advance their ideological prejudices. So, once again, it is necessary to lay out the facts and partisan hypocrisy behind the “torture” charge that has damaged our ability to gather the intelligence necessary to defend our safety and security.

Start with the imprecise or even willfully distorted language that always perfumes unsavory ideologies. In everyday use, “torture” can mean anything from a visit to the dentist to the sadistic mayhem of brutal regimes like Iran or North Korea. As a result, indiscriminate, lurid connotations and emotions attend the use of a word like “torture,” which of course is what makes it so useful for partisan smears.

Laws, however, have to be more precise. The statute concerning torture in U.S. law defines it as “an act committed by a person acting under the color of law specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody or physical control.” The law further clarifies “severe mental pain or suffering” as “the prolonged mental harm caused by or resulting from . . . the intentional infliction or threatened infliction of severe physical pain or suffering.”