Gina Haspel’s CIA Crucible She supervised legal interrogations of jihadists after 9/11.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/gina-haspels-cia-crucible-1525474212
Democrats have made a political calculation to delay or challenge every Donald Trump nominee, no matter the merits, and one egregious episode is playing out now. The left is smearing a nominee for CIA Director as a queen of torture, but the White House can win this argument if it rebuts the charges head on.
On Wednesday Gina Haspel will appear before the Senate Intelligence Committee for a confirmation hearing, and her critics are gearing up for a mugging. Ms. Haspel is largely unknown to the American public: Only recently did the CIA declassify some of the details of her 33-year CIA career. Ms. Haspel started as a case officer in Africa and after assignments around the world in its operations directorate became deputy director in 2017.
Ms. Haspel is the first CIA officer in more than five decades to reach the top position. She won the confidence of former director Mike Pompeo as his deputy, so the agency’s leadership transition would be straightforward.
The problem is that Democrats and Rand Paul of Kentucky are painting her as an unrepentant torturer. The specific rap is that Ms. Haspel in the early 2000s “ran a secret center in Thailand where prisoners were tortured,” as Mr. Paul put it in an op-ed. She is also branded for involvement in destroying tapes of CIA waterboarding.
Americans can disagree about the merits of enhanced interrogation after 9/11, but there’s no debating that the CIA’s interrogation program was legal at the time. The Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel produced memos making the legal case. The memos were withdrawn some years later, and Congress has also since changed the law to ban some of the techniques that were used in the immediate wake of 9/11. But Ms. Haspel is not responsible for any legal errors. Her job was to protect the country.
The tape destruction episode is also not what Ms. Haspel’s critics describe. The tapes involve waterboarding al Qaeda operatives in 2002, and the destruction came in 2005. At the time Ms. Haspel worked as chief of staff to Jose Rodriguez, former Director of the National Clandestine Service.
Mr. Rodriguez told Ms. Haspel to draft a cable ordering the destruction of the tapes. The ostensible reason was to shield the officers involved from public disgrace. Ms. Haspel followed the directions of her boss, who unknown to Ms. Haspel didn’t have the authority to destroy the tapes.
A 2011 CIA investigation by Michael Morell, deputy CIA director under President Obama, is abundantly clear that Ms. Haspel did nothing wrong: “I have found no fault with the performance of Ms. Haspel.”
Mr. Morell continues: “I have concluded that she acted appropriately in her role as Mr. Rodriguez’s Chief of Staff, including in her efforts to press for and facilitate a resolution of the matter, as well as in her drafting of the cable that authorized the destruction of the tapes. She drafted the cable on the direct orders of Mr. Rodriguez; she did not release that cable. It was not her decision to destroy the tapes; it was Mr. Rodriguez’s.”
One person corroborating the CIA version of events is the former Democratic chief counsel to the House Intelligence Committee. Jeremy Bash, now an NBC News analyst, wrote in an op-ed this week that the committee investigated the matter in 2007: “What we found was that Haspel was not depicted on the videotapes and that she did not make the decision to destroy the videotapes.”
By the way, Barack Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder unleashed special counsel John Durham to investigate Mr. Rodriguez and the interrogation program, and he brought no criminal charges.
By all accounts Ms. Haspel will tell Congress that she will not try to bring back such an interrogation program. And it’s notable how many former government officials have spoken up for her: From Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey to former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.
Mr. Obama’s Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said he’s “glad that they have a first woman as head of CIA” and “glad that it’s Gina” because she knows the agency. That Democrats like California’s Kamala Harris will probably vote against Ms. Haspel in committee is a useful reminder: The left talks about “women’s advancement” but they mean only certain women who conform to progressive specifications.
The White House will have to give Ms. Haspel the room to defend herself from such ugly accusations. That may mean changing the normal playbook of forcing a nominee to keep quiet in public, especially since the public has never heard from Ms. Haspel directly.
In any event, the self-righteousness is hard to take from Members of Congress, many of whom were briefed extensively on the enhanced interrogation techniques at the time and knew well what was happening. The people misrepresenting the CIA nominee were in the cheap seats during the worst days of the war on terror. Ms. Haspel didn’t have that luxury.
Comments are closed.
