Great Satan US Senate confirmed on Monday James Comey as the new director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation

The United States Senate confirmed on Monday James Comey as the new director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Comey, 52, will replace Robert Mueller, who has led the bureau since shortly before the September 11, 2001, attacks. He served as deputy attorney general from 2003 to 2005 under George W. Bush.

The Senate confirmed Comey overwhelmingly by a 93 to 1 margin. Republican Senator Rand Paul casted the only no vote over his concerns about the FBI’s use of domestic drones.

Senator Paul had threatened to filibuster Comey’s nomination unless the FBI answered questions about its use of domestic drones. He later released his hold when the FBI responded to his query.

Paul said in a statement that he disagreed with the FBI’s position that a warrant shouldn’t be required to deploy a spying drone.

Privacy advocates have also been alarmed at the number of loopholes the federal government uses to spy on its own citizens.

Comey admitted earlier this month that he signed a controversial memo in 2005 allowing the use of torture. He approved the torture memo that allowed the use of enhanced interrogation techniques like waterboarding and sleep deprivation on captured terrorism suspects.

The torture memos, which were drafted and signed in 2002, have been widely criticized by civil liberties advocates and legal scholars.

The memos stated that mental and physical torment and coercion such as binding in stress positions might be legally permissible during the so-called “War on Terror”.

The FBI has nearly 36,000 employees, including nearly 14-thousand special agents, who investigate cases from domestic and international terrorism to drug cases, civil rights violations, white collar crimes and public corruption.