CIA nominee vows not to allow torture
Veteran with 33 years in the agency oversaw secret Thailand prison
Gina Haspel pledges that she “will not restart” the CIA’s controversial interrogation program and would disregard any orders from President Trump to carry out other questionable activities.
WASHINGTON — Gina Haspel, President Donald Trump’s nominee to the lead the CIA, defended the agency’s torture of terrorism suspects as her confirmation hearing Wednesday served as another reckoning of the extraordinary measures the government employed in the frantic hunt for the Sept. 11 conspirators.
Haspel, a 33-year CIA veteran who oversaw a secret prison in Thailand in 2002 while an alQaida suspect was waterboarded there, said that she and other spies were working within the law. Though the CIA should never resume that type of work, she said, its officers should also not be judged for doing it.
“I’m not going to sit here with the benefit of hindsight and judge the very good people who made hard decisions, who were running the agency in very extraordinary circumstances,” she told the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Self-described Army ‘brat’
But poised to take over the agency, Haspel appeared eager to move past one of its darkest chapters.
She vowed that she would not start another interrogation program like the one developed under President George W. Bush. It involved brutal techniques like waterboarding, dousing detainees with buckets of ice water, stripping them naked, slamming them against the wall, forcing them to stay awake for as long as a week and subjecting some to medically unnecessary rectal feeding.
“Having served in that tumultuous time,” she said, “I can offer you my personal commitment, clearly and without reservation, that under my leadership, CIA will not restart such a detention and interrogation program.”
Haspel, seeking to shape the public’s impression of her in her first high-profile appearance, introduced herself as an Army “brat” born in Kentucky and a “typical, middle-class American” — albeit one who spent her adult life on the rise in the exotic world of intelligence gathering, where intrigue constantly lurked.
“From my first days in training, I had a knack for the nuts and bolts of my profession,” she said. “I excelled in finding and acquiring secret information that I obtained in brush passes, dead drops, or in meetings in dusty alleys of Third World capitals.”
But as senators began to press her on her views on torture, Haspel, 61, shrugged off the mantles of everyday citizen and spy-novel protagonist, revealing the disposition of a hardened secret agent.
She rejected Democrats’ suggestions that she declassify more information about her background, saying that the director should be subject to agency guidelines on keeping its secrets. She bristled and pushed back on suggestions that the interrogation program was immoral, insisting that her own “moral compass is strong,” and fought to describe what she said were its successes in capturing the United States’ mostwanted men.
The interrogation program “has cast a shadow over what has been a major contribution to protecting this country,” she said, citing the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-described mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, as an example of the CIA’s “extraordinary work.”
Haspel defended herself, saying she embraced the chance to serve after the terrorist attacks.
“After 9/11, I didn’t look to go sit on the Swiss desk — I stepped up,” she said. “I was not on the sidelines. I was on the front lines in the Cold War, and I was on the front lines in the fight against al-Qaida.” Questioned on videotapes
Democratic senators peppered her with confrontational questions from the outset. They repeatedly asked for details on Haspel’s role in some of the most notorious episodes of the interrogation program, including her conveyance of an order from her superior to destroy videotapes documenting 92 of the interrogations.
In her first public account of the destruction, which occurred in 2005, she said there were concerns about the “security risk” the tapes posed — that the lives of undercover agency officers might be put in danger if they were to become public.
Rumors have long swirled — but never been confirmed — that Haspel appeared in the tapes, some of which were made when she was running the CIA detention facility in Thailand. Her answer was definitive: “I did not appear on the tapes,” she said.