Is Gina Haspel The Right Woman For The Job?
The Director of the Central Intelligence Agency has a tough job. The balance of national security vs ethics and morality is a tug-of-war that I personally know would eat away at my soul. Having said that, there are certain lines that cannot be crossed in a civil society. Torture is NEVER an acceptable option. I know that is an easy position for me to take sitting in my hotel room as I write this. But it is also an easy position to defend regardless of where anyone is sitting. Arizona Senator John McCain recently spoke out against the nomination of Gina Haspel. I do not want to think about what Mr. McCain endured as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. As a victim of torture, I respect John McCain’s position that anyone who oversaw torture is not qualified to be the next CIA Director. While I do not have any personal knowledge of Ms. Haspel’s role in torturing enemy combatants or covering such acts up, I do think that issue is crucial in determining her fitness to serve as the CIA’s top officer. For all of those who want to Make America Great Again, I would like to recommend this as a starting point. Let’s all agree that torture is an unacceptable practice from a civilized government. American operatives who violated that principle during the Bush years failed our country from a moral and ethical perspective. If we want to be great again, we cannot ignore those transgressions and promote those who enabled these practices. Let’s call it Enhanced Vetting and determine whether or not Gina Haspel meets that ethical standard.
When Gina Haspel was nominated as the next head of the CIA in March, it re-opened debate on a murky period of recent US history – the use of secretive overseas prisons to torture terror suspects. As the BBC’s South East Asia correspondent Jonathan Head reports, the spotlight has fallen on Thailand, and one such “black site” which Haspel once ran.
In early April 2002, a plane took off from an undisclosed air base in Pakistan, en route to Thailand. On board was a special passenger.
Abu Zubaydah, a 31-year-old Saudi-born Palestinian, believed to be one of Osama Bin Laden’s top lieutenants, had been captured a few days earlier in a joint US-Pakistani raid on Al Qaeda safe houses in Faisalabad.
He was now in the hands of CIA agents, who had decided to make him the first “high-value detainee” to be subjected to what they called “enhanced interrogation techniques” – something human rights groups say amounts to torture.
But they needed somewhere to do it. In December 2014 the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) published an executive summary of a confidential 6,000 page report on these techniques.
The place where Abu Zubaydah and at least two other high-value detainees were interrogated is referred to only as Detention Site Green.
