Gina Haspell on Would She Order Torture Again
If all goes according to program, the adjacent director of the CIA volition be 30-twelvemonth agency veteran Gina Haspel, Trump's pick and the CIA's current deputy director. Haspel may be a CIA loyalist, but her appointment is a slap in the confront to the rule of law in the Us, to the reputation of the CIA and to the reputation of the country. Her confirmation would also be just ane more sign of the devil's deal that Washington has upheld for near 15 years when it comes to torture.
In that location is no way to sugarcoat this: Haspel was actively complicit in the (legal and fully CIA-and-White House sanctioned) torture program that was used confronting terrorism suspects. In the autumn of 2002, she took over running the first CIA detention facility of the so-chosen "war on terror," "Detention Site Green" in Thailand. The techniques approved for use in these offshore interrogations included: waterboarding, or mock drowning; sleep deprivation, including at least one period of 47 days; confinement in a coffin like box, and various forms of punching, shackling and humiliation, much of it done to naked bodies.
There is no way to sugarcoat this: Gina Haspel was actively complicit in the (legal and fully CIA-and-White House sanctioned) torture program.
Haspel's involvement in this "enhanced interrogation programme" varies depending on the source. Only reports from CIA officials also as details included in the 2014 Torture Study compiled by Sen. Dianne Feinstein'southward Select Commission on Intelligence describe what went on at the facility and attribute it to an unnamed "master of base." Haspel was also reportedly complicit in the decision to destroy recordings of the interrogations in 2005. Upward until their destruction, these tapes were kept at the black site overseen by Haspel and included the interrogations of Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, detainees who were tortured and whose fates remain in limbo.
The destructive consequences of the CIA'due south torture programme are undeniable.
Virtually obviously, the program undermined America's identity equally a nation of law and decency. Americans can no longer tell themselves that they live in a nation that privileges morality over acrimony, revenge and fear. Along these lines, the U.South. reputation for adhering to human rights laws and standards has been harmed, and with it, the U.South. ability to atomic number 82 internationally.
The shame and disrepute that the program would reap was articulate from the beginning, fifty-fifty to insiders. The treatment of Abu Zubaydah, who says he was subjected to the enhanced interrogation program, was then bad that CIA officials noted that if he died he would have to be cremated, presumably so that no one would know what had been done to his torso. If he lived, CIA officials wrote "we need to become reasonable assurances that [the detainee] volition remain in isolation and incommunicado for the remainder of his life."
A less well known consequence is that the CIA's torture of detainees has seriously impeded U.South. attempts to bring terrorists to justice, including nine/eleven perpetrators. President George Bush promised that "justice would be done" in retaliation for 9/11. Yet to this 24-hour interval, although the alleged co-conspirators of 9/11 have been in U.Southward. custody for well over a decade, information technology has proven most impossible to bring them to trial — either in federal court or in the military commissions — due to the legacy of torture. Tortured witnesses, tortured defendants and evidence garnered from tortured confessions have continually stymied the courtroom systems.
The fate of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed for example, the alleged mastermind of 9/11, remains in limbo. Similarly, the trial of Abd Al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who was interrogated at Haspel'southward Thai black site, has been hampered by the fact of his abusive treatment. Al-Nashri stands accused of masterminding the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in the Gulf of Aden that resulted in the deaths of 17 Americans. It's possible that attributable to torture, he may never be successfully tried and convicted in a court of constabulary.
Third, and peradventure near regrettably for our democracy, America'south menses of state-sponsored torture continues to haunt the body politic, perverting survivors and perpetrators akin. The legacy of secrecy, and the permutations required to protect information technology, seems never-catastrophe. The program itself was authorized secretly past the Department of Justice and the White House, and carried out secretly by the CIA. Since its exposure, beginning in 2004, the ends to which two administrations have gone to hide the details of the program have been Herculean. Challenges in court accept been thrown out on the grounds that state secrets — national security secrets — would be divulged. Recently, the Trump administration tried to employ this statement to keep Gina Haspel from having to prove in a torture lawsuit that was eventually settled.
Feinstein's Senate report was almost buried at birth, classified except for a half dozen,700-page executive summary. Since so, the CIA Inspector Full general "accidentally" destroyed its copy of the study. Obama agreed to preserve a re-create, keeping it from being destroyed but giving no assurances as to its declassification.
And the Trump administration, nether the direction of Sen. Richard Burr — now caput of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee — has called back the copies that had been distributed to several agencies in a further try to keep the savage cruelty of the program from condign public.
Defenders of Haspel'south nomination will argue that she was merely doing what she was told to exercise in a program that was ordered by the president and approved by the Department of Justice. "When she was given orders, she had to bear them out," ane former national security official remarked in defense of the nomination. Some other onetime official praised Haspel as "thoughtful and conscientious."
Rewarding a public servant's willingness to follow orders that blatantly violated her oath to the Constitution and the values of the country sets a terrible precedent.
But these arguments are non relevant to her confirmation. This is about something much bigger than Haspel herself. Rewarding a public retainer's willingness to follow orders that blatantly violated her adjuration to the Constitution and the values of the state sets a terrible precedent. And it is particularly dangerous when the president, equally candidate, embraced waterboarding and "and a hell of a lot worse."
Meanwhile, the CIA has not truly reckoned with this chapter of its legacy. The presumably shortly-to-exist parting caput of the agency, Mike Pompeo, refused to firmly back away from the CIA's torture policy during his confirmation hearing.
For over a decade, America has side-stepped accountability when it comes to creating and implementing these policies. (The Obama assistants opined that "we need to look forwards equally opposed to looking backwards.") At present, we take a president who muses about reinstating torture while endorsing a former practitioner who has seen no problem following questionable orders in the past. Who'southward to say that these orders won't be issued again?
Haspel'south confirmation to the position of CIA director would be a devastating capitulation to the dark forces that the country ostensibly left backside, and a sign to Americans — and the world — that we accept learned nothing from a program that was morally, legally and professionally indefensible.
Karen J. Greenberg is the director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law, the author of Rogue Justice: The Making of the Security State, and the editor of "The Torture Papers: The Route to Abu Ghraib and The Torture Contend in America."
Source: https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/gina-haspel-s-complicity-torture-makes-her-profoundly-unfit-be-ncna856551
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