The CIA is likely to pull out all the stops this week to promote one of its own former clandestine agents, Gina Haspel, to become the agency’s next director. Haspel is eminently qualified in terms of global experience, especially concerning the dangers to U.S. security interests posed by Russia.
But her experience also includes crucial decisions Haspel made during the time when the CIA was kidnapping terrorist suspects around the world, transporting them to secret locations and torturing them. Haspel’s role in one of her agency’s most shameful episodes deserves intense Senate scrutiny. Haspel’s patriotism isn’t under question; her moral judgment should be.
Haspel might have been a great field agent who served her country selflessly, but that doesn’t mean she demonstrates the skills to sift right from wrong while managing an agency with a history of illegality.
The CIA’s conduct should matter to people across America for more than just simple right and wrong. At any time, U.S. soldiers, intelligence agents and civilians could be kidnapped by foreign agents who use America’s own record as justification for torture. Foreign governments very often argue: The United States did it, therefore, it must be OK.
Torture is never OK. The United States must be the standard bearer of human rights around the world, especially as oppressive governments in Russia, Turkey, Egypt, Venezuela and the Philippines, to name a few, are taking advantage of America’s lax leadership on human rights to engage in mass arrests and curtailment of basic freedoms.
In the post-9/11 years, the CIA was unleashed to root out al-Qaida operatives and shut down their global terrorist network. Haspel reportedly played a key, and possibly heroic, role in that effort.
But she reportedly had an operational role in the torture of suspects at a clandestine CIA station. Her specific role isn’t clear, nor is it apparent that the torture undertaken in her station, thought to be in Thailand, produced actionable intelligence. The CIA had produced 92 videotapes of those interrogations, and a declassified 2011 CIA memo identifies her as being directly involved in the destruction of those tapes. The memo, from the agency’s deputy director, found no basis to discipline Haspel for her actions.
She either decided that her duty was to carry out a legally dubious order even if she knew it was wrong, or she never stopped to question the legality of what she was doing. Either way, her judgment was deeply flawed.
President Donald Trump, to whom Haspel would report, has advocated taking the gloves off and resuming the torture of terrorism suspects. Haspel lacked the clarity after 9/11 to sift right from wrong. What evidence is there that, as director, she would now lead the agency — and guide her boss — with a stricter moral compass?
— St. Louis Post-Dispatch
