May 10, 2018
By Joe Lauria
Instead of facing a judge to
defend herself against prosecution for violating U.S. law prohibiting torture,
33-year CIA veteran Gina Haspel on Wednesday faced the Senate Intelligence
Committee in a hearing to confirm her as director of the Central Intelligence
Agency.
Haspel does not look like
someone who would be associated with torture. Instead she would not be out of
place as your next door neighbor or as a kindly grade-school teacher. “I think
you will find me to be a typical middle-class American,” she said in her
opening statement.
Haspel is the face of America.
She not only looks harmless, but looks like she wants to help: perhaps to
recommend a good gardener to hire or to spread democracy around the globe while
upholding human rights wherever they are violated.
But this perfectly typical
middle class American personally supervised a black site in Thailand where
terrorism suspects were waterboarded. It remains unclear whether she had a
direct role in the torture. The CIA said she arrived at the black site after
the waterboarding of senior al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah had taken
place. Some CIA officials disputed that to The New York Times. The
newspaper also reported last
year that Haspel ran the CIA Thai prison in 2002 when another suspect, Abd
al-Rahim al-Nashiri, was waterboarded.
Even if she did not have a
direct hand in overseeing the torture, she certainly acquiesced to it. And if
that were not bad enough, Haspel urged
the destruction of 92 videotaped CIA “enhanced interrogations,” conducted at
the prison in Thailand, eliminating evidence in a clear-cut obstruction of
justice to cover-up her own possible crimes.
At her public hearing Haspel
refused to say that the torture was immoral. Instead she tried to romanticize
her nefarious past in adolescent language about the spy trade, about going to
secret meetings on “dark, moonless nights,” in the “dusty back alleys of Third
World capitals.”
Haspel claimed to have a
“strong moral compass.” We really can’t know because we only found out about
what she did in Thailand in 2002 because of press reports. Just about
everything else she did during her three decades at the agency remains shrouded
in secrecy because she refused to declassify almost all of her record for the
committee.
“Bloody Gina,” as some CIA
colleagues called her, told the hearing she would not re-institute the
“enhanced interrogation” program if she became director. One wonders if the US
were attacked again like on 9/11 if she would keep her vow, especially as she admitted
nothing wrong with “enhanced interrogation” the first time.
Haspel testified that the U.S.
has a new legal framework that governs detentions and interrogations forbidding
what she refused to call torture. But the U.S. already had a law on the books against
it when the Senate ratified the international Convention Against
Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment on
October 21, 1994. Every time the U.S. “tortured some folks” after that, as
Barack Obama put, it broke U.S. law.
In speaking about it in a
folksy way, Obama was minimizing the enormity of the crime and justifying his
decision to not prosecute any American who may have taken part in it. That
includes Haspel. So instead of facing the law she’s facing a career promotion
to one of the most powerful positions in the United States, if not the world.
McGovern Speaks Out
Haspel tried to wiggle out of
relentless questioning about whether she thought torture was immoral, let alone
illegal. Completely ignoring U.S. ratification of the Convention Against
Torture, Haspel clung to the new Army Field Manual, which contains a loophole
in an annex added after 9/11 that justifies cruel punishment, but not
specifically torture.
Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), who
was tortured in Vietnam, had no doubts about Haspel. After the hearing he
issued a statement saying, “Ms. Haspel’s role in overseeing the use of torture
by Americans is disturbing. Her refusal to acknowledge torture’s immorality is
disqualifying.”
Because
she wasn’t giving any straight answers, Ray McGovern, a CIA veteran of 27 years
and frequent contributor to Consortium News, stood up in the hearing room and
began asking his own questions. Capitol police were immediately ordered by the
chairman, Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC), to physically remove McGovern from the
room. As he continued turning towards the committee to shout his questions,
four officers hauled him out. They ominously accused him of resisting arrest.
Once they got him into the hallway, rather than letting him go his way, four
policemen wrestled him to the ground, re-injuring his dislocated left shoulder,
as they attempted to cuff him.
After spending the night in
jail, McGovern, 78, was to be arraigned on Thursday. He has not responded to
several voice message left on his mobile phone. A police officer at Central Booking
told Consortium News McGovern was no longer under their control and had been
sent to court. According to DC Superior Court, he has been charged with
Unlawful Disruption of Congress and Resisting Arrest. Ray returned home
Thursday night.
McGovern was one of several
people arrested before and during the hearing for speaking out. The spectacle
of citizens of this country, and in Ray’s case a veteran CIA officer, having to
resort to disrupting a travesty of a hearing to put an alleged torturer in
charge of the most powerful spy agency in the world is a disturbing indicator
of how far we have come.
A Different Kind of Hearing
In 1975, Sen. Frank Church
(D-ID) conducted hearings that revealed a raft of criminality committed by the
CIA, the National Security Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation over
a period of thirty years from the end of the Second World War. It has been more
than 40 years since that Senate investigation. After the release of the CIA
Torture Report by the Senate in 2014 and the revelations about the NSA by
Edward Snowden, a new Church Committee-style expansive probe into the
intelligence agencies is long overdue.
A central question it should
ask is whether the CIA really serves the interests of the American people or
rather the interests of its rulers, which the agency has done from its founding
by Wall Street elites, such as its first director, Allen Dulles.
While the
Republican-controlled intelligence committee may have partisan motives to
launch such a new Church-like commission to look into the agencies’ shenanigans
in the Russia-gate fiasco, the majority of Republicans are hawks on
intelligence matters and many support torture and want Haspel to be the next
CIA director. For instance, Burr told Haspel: “You are without a doubt the most
qualified person the president could choose to lead the CIA and the most
prepared nominee in the 70-year history of the agency. You have acted morally,
ethically and legally over a distinguished 30-year career.”
None of this bodes well for
the nation.
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