Gina Haspel in the dock
President Trump’s choice of veteran CIA operative Gina Haspel to lead the nation’s top spy agency has set off a cascade of protest from advocates who condemn her as an apologist for torture, if not a monstrous war criminal. Haspel’s role in the agency’s enhanced interrogation program deserves Senate scrutiny. But the effort to drown her in righteous indignation, overlook the rest of her long and strong record, and deem her summarily disqualified from leading the intelligence shop is woefully misguided.
More than 16 years after the destruction of the World Trade Center, there is much the American public still does not know, and may never know, about the U.S. government’s secret program of spiriting away and questioning terrorists.
What we do know is that Haspel reportedly oversaw a secret prison in Thailand where one Al Qaeda operative, mastermind of the USS Cole bombing, was waterboarded three times.
Widely circulated reports that Haspel also oversaw the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, who was waterboarded some 70 times, have since been corrected. She did not.
She did, however, reportedly follow through on a boss’ order to have videotaped evidence of Zubaydah’s sessions destroyed. She must answer to the morality and legality of that act.
Still, condemnation comes easy in the bright light of day, and in the comfort of relative safety from cataclysmic terrorism. Back then, those tasked with protecting the country believed in good faith that waterboarding and other tactics — including stress positions, sleep deprivation and forced nudity — were necessary to pry answers from hardened terrorists who welcomed death.
These tactics were approved by top administration officials. Members of congressional intelligence committees, Democrats and Republicans alike, were kept in the loop.
Relying on legal logic from the Bush administration that in retrospect can only be called tortured, they also believed that waterboarding, which subjects a human being to simulated drowning, was not legally a form of torture.
We have since come to know better: that waterboarding is in fact torture, contrary to the Geneva Conventions and American values. We have rightly abolished it and a wide range of other ghoulish means from America’s tool kit.
While it is essential for us collectively to learn from what Haspel has done right and wrong — and urgent for her to explain herself — it is folly to consider her forever tainted by her service.