The latest chapter in the ongoing saga of the president’s struggle to maintain a stable staff is unfolding this week, with his pick to head the CIA facing a round of questioning from the Senate Intelligence Committee this Wednesday. His pick is the agency’s past deputy director and current acting director, Gina Haspel, who has faced serious criticism for her role in the agency’s past torture program.
Criticism has been so intense that she is reported to have explored the option of withdrawing her name from consideration last week. She ultimately agreed to proceed with her nomination, and this Wednesday, she faced questioning from Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA) over her view of the CIA’s now defunct torture program.
Harris wanted a yes or no answer as to whether or not Haspel believes the program to have been “immoral,” but she would not give one.
After Haspel deflected, Harris asked her at one point:
‘Do you believe the previous techniques — now armed with hindsight — do you believe they were immoral? Yes or no?’
The president’s CIA pick responded by saying:
‘Senator, I believe that we should hold ourselves to the moral standard outlined in the Army field manual.’
Check out the video below.
Haspel repeatedly declines to answer “yes” or “no” as to whether previous interrogation techniques were “immoral” https://t.co/2MMmZpk0Jd
— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) May 9, 2018
Harris pressed Haspel to that effect after she told a previous questioner — Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) — that she would not, as leader of the CIA, allow it to enact a program or policy that she felt was “immoral,” no matter if it was technically legal or even a direct order of the president.
She told Warner at one point that she would not “put CIA officers at risk by asking them to undertake risky, controversial activity again.”
It was as an extension of that interchange that Harris pressed Haspel to reveal whether her stated hesitation to endorse a torture program was because of personally finding it to be immoral, but Haspel wouldn’t go along with that line of questioning.
Pressing the potential next CIA director for her exact personal stance when it comes to torture is hardly out of place considering the current political climate. The president himself has endorsed the practice, having stated early last year that he feels that the practice “absolutely” works.
More recently, the president cast the torture program that Haspel was involved in during her time at the CIA as just being “tough” on terrorists, doing so in response to criticism of his pick to lead the agency.
He has also given credence in the past to the idea of punitively killing terrorists’ families.
As to the question of whether or not torture “works,” Haspel told Harris that while valuable information had been gleaned from the United States’ interrogation of Al Qaeda operatives, she does not “think it’s knowable whether interrogation techniques played a role in that.”
Her nomination to lead the CIA still has to make it to a Senate floor vote, where it is uncertain even if likely that she will be confirmed, considering the slim Republican majority in the legislative body. Republican Senator John McCain’s absence from the Senate while dealing with his cancer has been cited as possibly making Republicans’ pro-Haspel position more vulnerable, but even he has hardly gone blindly along with the nomination. In a March letter, McCain sought precise clarification from Haspel of her role in the torture program.
Featured Image via Screenshot from the Video
