Our view: Haspel has sterling qualifications but a troubling past
America’s decision in the desperate months after 9/11 to torture captured terrorists has proved to be an indelible stain on the national honor that so far cannot be scrubbed away.
This has become painfully clear as the Senate wrestles with whether to approve as new CIA director a highly qualified candidate who, nonetheless, is also a veteran of that dark period in our nation’s past.
Gina Haspel has served 33 years with the agency, most of it clandestinely, and would be the first female director, certainly an inspiration to other women in a male-dominated field.
Given her résumé, Haspel might very well be, as Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr said last week, the most qualified nominee for the job in the CIA's 70 years. Accolades have flowed from former agency chiefs under both Republican and Democratic administrations.
Leon Panetta, who ran the CIA when it located Osama bin Laden in 2011, told us that Haspel would fearlessly speak "truth to power" for a president not always receptive to unvarnished fact.
Perhaps most important, she has promised — though it took persistent questioning during her confirmation hearing last week — that even if President Trump ordered her to resume waterboarding (simulated drowning) and other acts of torture, she’d refuse.
The threat of such an order is no idle conjecture. Trump boasted as a candidate of reimposing waterboarding and “a hell of a lot worse.” Among his first acts as president was drafting a sweeping order that, if he ever signed it, would start a process of reopening overseas “black sites” such as those where torture was carried out.
All of which might shed light on why he chose Haspel as his nominee — and also on why her selection is not, to quote former CIA director George Tenet in a different context, a “slam dunk.”
Haspel operated one of those black sites in 2002, when more attacks were feared in the aftermath of 9/11. Congress has since banned the brutal interrogation practices, and she testified Wednesday that she supports this “stricter moral standard.” But during that same hearing, she could not bring herself to characterize the waterboarding carried out under her command in 2002, and scores of other times by the CIA, as immoral.
The Washington Post has reported that in the past she was an “enthusiastic supporter” of the CIA’s interrogation program. Haspel also played a role in the CIA’s infamous “extraordinary rendition program” that allowed for captured militants to be turned over to foreign governments for torture.
In 2005, she participated in destroying video evidence of brutal interrogations. She drafted a cable sent out by her boss ordering the shredding of more than 90 videotapes. The action was done without the CIA director’s approval and despite White House opposition. An internal investigation later found Haspel blameless.
And there is much more the public doesn’t know. Haspel, now acting CIA director, has released few specifics about herself. Americans are left to largely trust her supporters. Three committee Democrats who reviewed her classified background say they found disturbing details.
In the final analysis, the decision to approve Haspel as the next CIA director is fraught — a tough call for all but reflexive partisans. As a consequence, the USA TODAY Editorial Board, which reflects a diversity of viewpoints and operates by consensus, failed to reach one about her nomination.
It’s anyone’s guess who Trump might choose in the unlikely event that the Senate rejects her nomination. Given her vast experience, she would undoubtedly hit the ground running with substantial support within the agency.
Haspel remains, however, inextricably linked to a shameful period. “The methods we employ to keep our nation safe must be as right and just as the values we aspire to live up to and promote in the world,” Sen. John McCain, RAriz., who was tortured while a prisoner of North Vietnam, said last week in arguing against Haspel’s nomination.
The Senate’s duty is to carefully weigh her qualifications against the message her confirmation would send to other nations, to U.S. servicemembers who might face moral dilemmas in the battlefield and to future generations of Americans.