CIA director nominee Gina Haspel wrote Monday that the agency’s so-called “enhanced interrogation” program, also known as torture, “is not one the CIA should have undertaken.”
“While I won’t condemn those that made these hard calls, and I have noted the valuable intelligence collected, the program ultimately did damage to our officers and our standing in the world,” Haspel wrote in a letter to the vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA). CNN obtained and published the letter.
Haspel was criticized following her confirmation hearing last week for refusing to say whether the United States’ use of torture following the September 11, 2001 attacks was immoral, instead asserting that “I support the higher moral standard we have decided to hold ourselves to.”
“As Director,” she wrote in her letter to Warner on Monday, “I would refuse to undertake any proposed activity that is contrary to my moral and ethical values.”
She still has not defined what those values are.
Haspel became the chief of base at a Thai black site in 2002. Though she was not in charge during the now infamous repeated waterboarding of detainee Abu Zubaydah, she was in charge when another detainee, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, was reportedly slammed against a wall, locked in a tiny “confinement box” and waterboarded while in the CIA’s custody, according to CIA documents reviewed and published recently by ProPublica.
Haspel also later wrote, on the orders of a superior, the cable instructing staff at the black site to destroy tapes of the interrogations of al-Nashiri and Zubaydah. CIA Deputy Director Mike Morell, in a 2011 review, found no fault on Haspel’s part.
In a New York Times op-ed last week, Fatima Boudchar wrote that the black site led by Haspel “sounds like the one where I was tortured” in 2004.
Haspel also later wrote, on the orders of a superior, the memo instructing staff at the black site to destroy tapes of the interrogations of al-Nashiri and Zubaydah.
So Haspel made a statement of fact - using torture did damage the CIA. She is STILL however, hedging. “I would refuse to authorize any activity which is contrary to my moral values” doesn’t mean anything if she won’t say what she considers moral or immoral.
Translation: “Getting caught did damage to the CIA. Next time, if I’m in charge, we’re keeping it even more secret.”
Like the information, courtesy of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed during one of his 183 waterboardings, about the black Muslim jihadist recruits who have no-doubt by now overrun Montana?
Sorry, Bloody Gina. Torture does not now nor has it ever produced “valuable intelligence.”
Right off the bat she’s wrong. She should condemn them and they weren’t hard calls, deciding to torture a human being is not a difficult decision, if it is then you lack the moral values to be in the position you were in. And what actionable and valuable intelligence was gained from torture?
That’s an excuse to just change your moral and ethical “values” to fit the situation. This monster might be good for the job if one just looks at her resume, but she’s completely morally and ethically lacking when it comes to overseeing one of our intelligence agencies.