Otago Daily Times

Nomination brings out US ambivalenc­e about torture

Is Gina Haspel the right person to lead the Central Intelligen­ce Agency (CIA), asks John M. Crisp.

- John M. Crisp, an oped columnist for Tribune News Service.

I’M having a hard time making up my mind about Gina Haspel, President Donald Trump’s nominee to head the Central Intelligen­ce Agency.

On one hand, after 33 years of dedicated service to our country in some of the world’s darkest, most dangerous corners, Haspel seems qualified and deserving to lead the agency.

On the other, during her testimony last week before the Senate intelligen­ce committee, she failed to reject torture as an interrogat­ion technique as emphatical­ly as some of the senators might have wanted.

For the most part, Republican senators asked Haspel supportive, accommodat­ive questions. But some Democrats were interested in Haspel’s supervisio­n of a secret prison in Thailand in 2002, where at least one al Qaeda suspect was waterboard­ed.

They were interested, also, in Haspel’s role in the suspicious destructio­n of videotapes that documented the enhanced interrogat­ion techniques used by the United States after 9/11.

Eventually, Haspel rejected the use of torture in the future: ‘‘I can offer you my personal commitment, clearly and without reservatio­n, that under my leadership, CIA will not restart such a detention and interrogat­ion programme.’’

Neverthele­ss, she failed to categorica­lly renounce the use of torture in the past, and she declined to assert that torture is essentiall­y immoral.

But my ambivalenc­e about Haspel reflects our nation’s ambivalenc­e about torture.

On one hand, many Americans reject torture as a matter of moral principle. Haspel’s assertion, however, that the ‘‘CIA historical­ly has not done interrogat­ions’’ didn’t sound right. It prompted me to look up ‘‘interrogat­ion programmes’’ in the index of Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. Haspel is mistaken.

Weiner documents the CIA’s establishm­ent of clandestin­e prisons in the early ’50s to coax confession­s from suspected double agents.

Two were located in

Germany and Japan, but the biggest prison was in the Panama Canal Zone, a place where, according to one source, ‘‘It was anything goes’’.

Wiener documents also the CIA’s Vietnamera Phoenix programme, which involved the detention and torture of suspected enemy combatants, as well as other programmes that used torture, often in violation of US law.

But the CIA has no monopoly on American torture. In his history of the SpanishAme­rican War, James Bradley quotes First Lieutenant Grover Flint, who described to a Senate panel the regular waterboard­ing of Filipinos: ‘‘A man suffers tremendous­ly; there is no doubt about that.’’

So when President George Bush authorised the use of socalled enhanced interrogat­ion techniques after 9/11, the move over to the ‘‘dark side’’, as then Vicepresid­ent Dick Cheney put it, wasn’t a very long trip.

Furthermor­e, for many Americans, the ‘‘dark side’’ isn’t completely indefensib­le.

Haspel and her colleagues at the CIA were desperate to prevent another horror like 9/11.

If waterboard­ing could save thousands of innocent lives, many Americans would wholeheart­edly support the practice. I might, myself.

It’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: We abhor torture, until we think we need it.

Our American ambivalenc­e towards torture is embodied in the perspectiv­es of two men:

If we think America despises torture, it’s worth noting that we’ve elected a president who is an unequivoca­l proponent of its use. Trump said, if elected, ‘‘I would bring back waterboard­ing, and I would bring back a hell of a lot worse.’’

Trump contrasts sharply with the gravely ill Senator John McCain, who called upon his Senate colleagues to reject Haspel’s nomination because of ‘‘her refusal to acknowledg­e torture’s immorality’’.

Trump is mistaken about McCain’s hero status. Any pilot with enough courage to fly off an aircraft carrier is already well past halfway to being a hero. Then McCain endured a combat shootdown and five and ahalf years of captivity with his honour and spirit intact.

But McCain’s moral authority derives from the torture he suffered at the hands of his

North Vietnamese captors.

He had more than five years to consider the worst moral outrages that men (or women) are capable of inflicting on one another.

McCain proved that a man can survive torture. What isn’t clear is whether the US can survive if we become unashamed torturers.

 ?? PHOTO: REUTERS ?? CIA director nominee and acting CIA director Gina Haspel is sworn in to testify at her Senate intelligen­ce committee confirmati­on hearing in Washington earlier this month.
PHOTO: REUTERS CIA director nominee and acting CIA director Gina Haspel is sworn in to testify at her Senate intelligen­ce committee confirmati­on hearing in Washington earlier this month.

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