Nominee pledges not to resume CIA torture
WASHINGTON — Gina Haspel, President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the CIA, defended the agency’s past torture of terrorism suspects during her confirmation hearing Wednesday, which 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 al-Qaida suspect was waterboarded there, said she and other spies were working within the law. Though the CIA should never resume that type of work, she said, its officers also should 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. Gina Haspel, President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Central Intelligence Agency, defended those in the agency who chose to use harsh interrogation tactics in the past.
She vowed not to 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 walls and forcing them to stay awake for as long as a week.
“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 introduced herself as an Army “brat” born in Kentucky and a “typical, middle-class American. But she has spent her adult life on the rise in the exotic world of intelligence gathering, where danger and intrigue constantly lurked.
“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,” she said.
But as senators began to press her on her views on torture, Haspel, 61, revealed the disposition of a hardened secret agent. 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’ most-wanted 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.”
When asked if she agrees with the president’s assertion that torture works, Haspel said: “I don’t believe that torture works.” She added that she doesn’t think Trump would ask the CIA to resume waterboarding, which simulates drowning.
“I would not allow CIA to undertake activity that I thought was immoral, even if it was technically legal,” said Haspel. “I would absolutely not permit it.”
Democratic senators repeatedly asked for details on Haspel’s role in some of the most-notorious episodes of the interrogation program, including her conveyance in 2005 of an order from her superior to destroy videotapes documenting 92 of the interrogations.
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 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.