From TPM:
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) on Thursday morning called on the CIA to release documents related to CIA director nominee Gina Haspel’s involvement in the agency’s torture program.
“As we move forward with the nomination process for Ms. Haspel, my fellow Senators and I must have the complete picture of Ms. Haspel’s involvement in the program in order to fully and fairly review her record and qualifications. I also believe the American people deserve to know the actual role the person nominated to be the director of the CIA played in what I consider to be one of the darkest chapters in American history,” Feinstein wrote in a letter to CIA Director Mike Pompeo.
Here’s a little more info from the New York Times:
Just over a year after the Sept. 11 attacks, the C.I.A. dispatched the veteran clandestine officer Gina Haspel to oversee a secret prison in Thailand. Shortly after, agency contractors in the frantic hunt for the conspirators waterboarded a Qaeda suspect three times and subjected him to brutal interrogation techniques.
Ms. Haspel’s time running the prison, code-named Cat’s Eye, began her deep involvement in the agency’s counterterrorism operations and showed her willingness to take part in the agency’s rendition, detention and interrogation program, which shaped her career. She was a rising star until that dark chapter in C.I.A. history began to emerge publicly.
But under President Trump, her fortunes changed, and on Tuesday, he announced that he intended to name her director of the C.I.A.
The Atlantic also has this to say:
In 2005, Jose Rodriguez, the CIA’s counterterrorism chief, ordered the destruction of some 92 videotapes of the harsh methods being used on al-Qaeda suspects that the black site Haspel had once run. Rodriguez issued this order in defiance not only of the CIA’s own general counsel at the time, John Rizzo, but also of a federal court order. And to draft the cable ordering the tapes to be thrown into an “industrial-strength shredder,”Rodriguez turned to his then-chief of staff—Haspel.
Rodriguez was later criticized for his actions by the CIA’s inspector general; but true accountability—for the torture program itself, as well as for the destruction of evidence—has proved elusive. This gives rise to another set of questions that will need to be pressed in the Senate. Was Haspel pleased with the order she drafted, or troubled by it? Does she stand by Rodriguez’s public justification, that he was protecting the lives of his operatives, or his private one, documented in declassified emails, that the tapes would make him and his group “look terrible”? Above all, if the torture program was so valuable and necessary, why destroy the tapes at all?
Haspel’s apparently positive view of torture was by no means universally shared within the CIA, even at the time. Again, I know from personal experience that many professionals within the agency courageously chose to stand up against the enhanced techniques, walking away from black sites in protest and registering a large number of complaints that eventually led to the inspector general’s report.
Call your Senators and urge them to vote against Haspel’s nomination. Click here.