Torturer Refuses to Condemn Torture

A day after Gina Haspel, President Trump's nominee to lead the C.I.A., refused during her confirmation hearing on Wednesday to condemn the agency's torture of Qaeda suspects, several lawmakers and human-rights advocates said aspects of her testimony merited greater scrutiny.

While Haspel, the agency's acting director, vowed never to start another detention and interrogation program, her testimony was laced with ambiguities about the program and her understanding of limits on the C.I.A.'s powers.

For example, she promised to follow "the law" but insisted that the agency's interrogations were legal at the time.

At one point, for example, she told Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, that "I was not even read into the interrogation program until it had been up and running for a year."

Being "read in" means being briefed about classified information. The agency started its torture program in the summer of 2002, months after the capture of Abu Zubaydah, the first detainee the agency took into custody and for whom it initially developed its list of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques, like waterboarding.

By late 2002, Haspel was running a secret C.I.A. prison in Thailand where another detainee in her custody, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, was subjected to waterboarding, prolonged sleep deprivation and other such tactics.

Asked about the apparent discrepancy, Ryan Trapani, an agency spokesman, said in a statement, "Acting Director Haspel has said that she was briefed on some of C.I.A.'s more sensitive counterterrorism authorities and activities in October 2002."

In 2005, as the torture program was coming under investigation, she drafted an order to destroy 92 videotapes of interrogation sessions.

Ms. Haspel's testimony about that episode also attracted scrutiny. For example, she told Ms. Feinstein that the destroyed videotapes "were recordings of only one detainee."

"It was 92 tapes of one detainee," she said.

But while most of the tapes depicted interrogations of Mr. Zubaydah, two were long believed to be of Mr. Nashiri, the detainee who was tortured in her custody.

She knew that Congress wanted the tapes, but ordered them destroyed anyway. Not holding these monsters accountable was one of the biggest failings of Obama, IMO.

https://nyti.ms/2KNZodn