Pompeo: CIA will not torture captives
WASHINGTON — Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Kan., Donald Trump’s pick to head the CIA, told senators at his confirmation hearing Thursday that he would not carry out orders from the White House to use torture, a position that potentially puts him at odds with the president-elect.
During his campaign last year, Trump repeatedly said he would bring back waterboarding and other harsh interrogation tactics that the CIA has abandoned, that President Barack Obama labeled torture, and that now are illegal.
In a 21⁄2-hour hearing, Pompeo repeatedly assured members of the Senate Intelligence Committee that he would not restart the CIA’s use of secret prisons and brutal interrogation tactics.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., ranking Democrat on the committee, pressed Pompeo to pledge he would not do so even if ordered by Trump.
“Absolutely not,” he promised, adding, “I can’t imagine I would be asked to do that by the president-elect.”
He said he had voted for the law that restricted CIA interrogation methods to those in the Army Field Manual, and that any attempts to go beyond those guidelines would be illegal and require Congress to pass a new law.
Feinstein was one of the harshest critics of the CIA’s network of “black sites” to secretly hold terrorism suspects overseas, and its use of waterboarding, sleep deprivation and other harsh tactics to interrogate them in the years after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
The program is widely considered a dark stain on the CIA record, not least because Feinstein and other critics say the evidence shows the torture utterly failed to produce significant intelligence.
Senate confirmation for Pompeo appears all but assured. He received largely friendly questions before the committee moved to a secure room to ask about classified matters.
The hearing was interrupted shortly after it began when the hearing room lights suddenly went out. That led to jokes about Russian sabotage while technicians scrambled for half an hour to fix the glitch.
Sen. Mark R. Warner, D-Va., who was criticizing Russian hacking when the room went dark, joked when the lights came back, “To be sure we don’t have the lights turn out again, I won’t do the second half of my statement.”
During the public session, Pompeo promised repeatedly to give Trump unvarnished assessments of U.S. intelligence, even if the incoming president doesn’t like them.