Senate should not excuse torture
The country is straining to reach a low bar indeed when a would-be Cabinet-level official has to rule out resuming torture — especially given that Gina Haspel, President Trump’s nominee for CIA director, could not muster any more high-minded condemnation of brutal post-9/11 interrogation methods.
“We’re not getting back in that business,” Haspel told the Senate Intelligence Committee Wednesday, as if torture were simply a trendy investment that had lost its luster, like subprime mortgages or premium vodka.
Granted, Haspel at the time was a lieutenant in the administration that devised “enhanced interrogation techniques” and made torture a matter of government policy. But now that the CIA deputy director aspires to lead the agency, what her testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee this week conspicuously lacked was any acknowledgment that she participated in a grave legal and moral error.
Nor was Haspel’s involvement peripheral. For a time, she ran a secret CIA
prison in Thailand where terrorism suspects were waterboarded, hurled against walls, deprived of sleep, kept naked, and confined to spaces approximating a coffin. Under questioning by Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., she refused to describe such tactics as immoral or even ineffective. That’s more troubling given that the president who nominated her has repeatedly expressed unabashed enthusiasm for torture.
Haspel also communicated and still supports the order that led to the destruction of recordings of those methods being employed at the Thailand black site. Meanwhile, the CIA’s continued and disputed classification of most of her history further obscures the facts from the public and most lawmakers.
In sharp contrast to many Trump nominees, Haspel’s history is relevant to the job, and admirable in large part. She has more than 30 years of decorated service as an undercover officer, much of which no doubt deserves the nation’s gratitude. She would also be the first female CIA director and only the second to have spent a career in the clandestine service. She has been praised by top intelligence officials from Republican and Democratic administrations alike.
But prominent lawmakers from both parties have justified reservations about her, among them Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., both national security hawks who have criticized “enhanced interrogations.”
President Barack Obama correctly called those measures torture, but ruled out the possibility of prosecuting intelligence officers who carried them out under his predecessor, George W. Bush. The very different decision before the Senate is whether to reward one of them with the CIA’s top job. That would signal a renewed national embrace of a dark and not very distant chapter of our history.