The director of the Central Intelligence Agency shouldn’t find it difficult to issue a full-throated condemnation of torture. Our nation wrote most of the international agreements banning it.

But Gina Haspel, President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the agency, couldn’t meet that standard in Senate confirmation hearing last week. With three decades of distinguished service on her resume, Haspel is qualified to run the CIA. She’d be the first female CIA director. And she reportedly has the confidence of managers and rank-and-file employees at the agency.

Haspel, though, was tasked in 2002 with overseeing a secret CIA prison in Thailand where prisoners under interrogation were waterboarded, deprived of sleep to the point of danger, physically and psychologically abused and confined in tiny, painful boxes. And she was involved in the destruction of videotapes of those torture sessions in 2005, as questions about CIA interrogation methods were mounting.

In testifying, she said the CIA under her leadership “will not restart such an interrogation and detention program.”

But she could not bring herself to call torture immoral, which it is. And asked how she would respond if, as George W. Bush did after 9/11, a president twisted the law to order torture, she gave contradicting answers.

This week, three Americans were released unharmed from North Korea. If the United States argues that torture is acceptable in the pursuit of its own interests, other nations will know it is acceptable to torture Americans, and such safe returns will be harder to achieve.

Unless Haspel can convincingly condemn the use of torture, she should not be confirmed, because her ascension would put our nation’s stamp of acceptance on behavior it must condemn.

—Newsday

There’s a good bit of sorting out to do with the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision Monday to strike down a federal law prohibiting sports gambling, but it’s difficult to overstate the ruling’s impact.

The decision gives states permission to decide whether they want to allow sports gambling inside their borders. New Jersey will be the first, followed by a few others that are close to ready. Other stateswill get around soon enough to debating sports betting. Most will allow it, in part because everyone else will be doing it, but also because it’s harder to build a moral case against gambling when you already offer a state-sanctioned form of it with a lottery.

So what does this mean? Get ready for a different landscape out there — and not just financially. The bigger change will be cultural.

Gambling just became mainstream.

Here’s why: Imagine walking into Spectrum Arena and seeing kiosks that allow you to place small (or not so small) bets on the Charlotte Hornets game you’re about to see. Imagine getting a notification on your phone that not only tells you about the latest Carolina Panthers’ rushing touchdown — but invites you to make a bet on what will happen next.

(Imagine also if those notifications came from media companies — say, ESPN — that realize sports betting revenue is the key they’ve been searching for to make their business models work.)

It’s not that far-fetched. In-game betting — which means placing wagers on action as it’s happening — already is common with soccer matches in England. The same will happen here. Sports gambling will transition from something confined to the hard core and on-a-lark bettors. Placing a wager will become so easy, and so common, that more people will dabble in it.

Is that a good thing? It won’t be for those vulnerable to addiction, of course, and it won’t be for families that are damaged in the short or long term by poor gambling decisions. States that approve sports gambling in their borders should also consider offering additional resources to combat the addiction issues that might follow. Sports leagues, too, will face new challenges, including ensuring that the integrity of their games aren’t compromised.

But like so many things in commerce, availability and ease will dictate what society eventually thinks about it. It will take time, but betting just became less of a dirty word.