US President Appointee as CIA Director Linked to Tortures

For much of its existence, Haspel was deputy director of the CIA’s counterterrorism center that ran the program using “enhanced interrogation techniques”. “We need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards”, Obama said in 2009.

On Tuesday morning, President Trump fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson via Twitter. Its reporting on Haspel had been cited by a number of media outlets – including NPR, which has collaborated with ProPublica on other stories in the past. All of them praised her. Only after the Bush administration tried to argue that waterboarding was “enhanced interrogation”, and not torture banned by USA and global law, did a domestic debate arise.

“It is important to note that she has spent almost her entire Central Intelligence Agency career undercover”, Boyd said. A third referred to her “managing a detention facility”.

Kiriakou spoke to As It Happens host Carol Off about Haspel’s career and why she’s known among colleagues as “Bloody Gina”.

Paul accused Haspel of expressing “gleeful joy” over torture.

To be sure, national security adviser H.R. McMaster and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, both of whom have either made statements or acted against the president’s views on Russian Federation, are rumored to be the next officials who will be shown the door. But she knew about it and destroyed evidence of it.

A ProPublica investigation published a year ago detailed how Haspel “was more deeply involved in the torture of Abu Zubaydah than has been publicly understood, according to newly available records and accounts by participants”. “To this was added the placement of harmless insects in the confinement box (based on AZ’s apparent discomfort with insects)”. In a waterboarding session, the person is strapped flat on a board tilted so the feet are elevated higher than the head.

For its part, regarding this fake news about Haspel, Hot Air’s John Sexton discovered that the far-left New York Times appears to have done a stealth-retraction/non-retraction. To defend torture is to attack the Constitution. Only when questioning changed to subjects on which he had information (toward the end of waterboard usage) was he forthcoming. Very clearly no. But Gina and people like Gina did it, I think, because they enjoyed doing it. ‘I’m tough on terrorism. I do not blame Paul for using it as a basis for not supporting her or anyone else who used it to question if she’ll face a tough road to confirmation. Gina Haspel is not one of those women.

Meghan McCain on Thursday defended her father, who was a Vietnam prisoner of war, against an attack from Liz Cheney, who tried justifying the CIA’s enhanced interrogation program under her father’s vice presidency.

They did not dispute her involvement in drafting orders to destroy videotapes of harsh interrogation techniques, which was reported in the book “Hard Measures”, by Jose Rodriguez, her boss in the agency at the time, and former CIA spokesman Bill Harlow. She joined the agency in 1985 and climbed the ranks. She will have some hurdles to overcome. “Of course, the question is how her relationship with the White House will be because of those views and because she doesn’t have any special relationship with the president”. “Most importantly, she has the admiration and respect of the workforce”. I’m sorry, but this is really bothering me that this story remain untouched until now.

“The acts of torture described in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report violated the God-given human dignity inherent in all people and were unequivocally wrong”, stated Bishop Oscar Cantú of Las Cruces, who was chair of the USA bishops’ global justice and peace committee at the time.

Obama’s decision must have seemed like the obvious one at the time.