Campaign Action
The CIA has been engaged in a highly unusual PR campaign promoting Gina Haspel, the CIA official who oversaw one of the notorious "black sites" in the Bush-Cheney administration, a site that could be characterized as a torture chamber. Not only did she allow torture, including waterboarding, on her watch, she drafted a memo authorizing the destruction of videotapes that showed that torture. Three Democratic senators on the Senate Intelligence Committee—Dianne Feinstein, Ron Wyden, and Martin Heinrich—have been hammering the CIA to publicly release information about Haspel's work in the torture program, and the CIA has been pretending to respond.
The CIA has just done it again, telling the senators that it will allow them, in a secure setting, to review the materials. The three Democrats blasted the offer as "wholly inadequate."
"Ms. Haspel is not an undercover operative, she's the deputy CIA director seeking a Cabinet-level position," the three Democrats said in a statement. "It's unacceptable for the CIA to hide her behind a wall of secrecy, particularly when such secrecy is unnecessary to protect national security."
Meanwhile, the CIA is touting this as "transparency."
"CIA welcomes this transparency, not only to provide greater fidelity on Deputy Director Haspel's experience but also to correct inaccuracies in the public discourse," CIA director of congressional affairs Jamie Cheshire wrote in the Tuesday missive, which also went to the bipartisan leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Cheshire added that the agency "is actively working towards sharing additional information with the public to the greatest extent possible consistent with our responsibility to protect information the disclosure of which reasonably could be expected to cause damage to the national security."
There's nothing about the torture program that could be released now that would damage national security, unless it was the elevation of Haspel, who we already know was neck-deep in the program, to head the agency. The senators are demanding the full declassification of "information related to the background of CIA Deputy Director Gina Haspel" so that the full Senate and the public has the opportunity to know just what it is in it.
"In the absence of any meaningful declassification of her career, this public campaign on behalf of Ms. Haspel does a great disservice to the American people, who expect and deserve to understand the backgrounds of their government's leaders. Indeed, the more we review the classified facts, the more disturbed we are, both by the actions she has taken during her career and by the CIA's failure to allow the public the opportunity to consider them. Under these circumstances, it is impossible for the Senate to properly fulfill its constitutional obligation to ‘advise and consent' on her nomination," Heinrich, Wyden, and Feinstein wrote.
Haspel's hearing in the Intelligence Committee is scheduled for May 9.