Marshall Billingslea may yet officially become the State Department’s top arms-control official, after the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday recommended his nomination for a floor vote.
The 11-10 vote was split along party lines, with Democrats uniformly opposing Billingslea’s nomination as undersecretary of state for arms control and international security and Republicans almost unanimously in support. There was a twist, though: Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) voted “present.” Paul had previously probed the Donald Trump administration about Billingslea’s role during the George W. Bush administration in spreading the use of interrogation techniques that were later deemed torture.
Paul’s office did not reply to a request for comment regarding his vote.
Committee Ranking Member Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), who has publickly excoriated Billingslea’s human-rights record in the Bush years, demanded the roll-call vote.
“[T]oday’s meeting, and particularly the inclusion of Mr. Billingslea, does not do justice to the Senate, the Constitution, or the American people,” Menendez said at the top of the brief business meeting.
A Senate report from 2008 showed Billingslea, then the principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, advocated for techniques later recognized as torture on terrorism detainees at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. On Tuesday, Menendez said Billingslea’s hard-line support for sleep deprivation, forced shaving, stripping, and other techniques helped spread those torture methods to other government installations.
Nominated by the White House in May, Billingslea would succeed Andrea Thompson, who stepped down last October. As State’s special presidential envoy for arms control, Billingslea is already leading the Trump administration’s attempts to replace the bilateral New START nuclear-arms-control treaty between Washington and Moscow with a trilateral agreement that also includes China. Beijing has said it will have no part of such a treaty.
U.S. and Russian negotiators, along with technical advisers including representatives of the National Nuclear Security Administration, are meeting this week in Vienna, Austria, for working-group discussions about a possible New START extension. The treaty will expire in February, failing an extension by the U.S. president and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
