This story was updated at 4:07 p.m. on March 17.
ProPublica has issued a correction for mistakenly saying in an article that Gina Haspel, President Trump’s nominee to head the CIA, was involved with the treatment a terror suspect and falsely stated she mocked the suspect.
Although Haspel, who has been with the CIA since 1985, was in charge of a covert CIA prison in Thailand where detainees were subject to waterboarding and other interrogation methods in 2002, the ProPublica story falsely stated she was directly involved with the torture of a prisoner by the name of Abu Zubaydah. Zubaydah was waterboarded at the CIA prison on 83 occasions.
“It is now clear that Haspel did not take charge of the base until after the interrogation of Zubaydah ended,” ProPublica said in the correction Thursday.
ProPublica said three former former government officials previously told the outlet that Haspel was the “chief of base” when Zubaydah had been waterboarded, and ProPublica also referenced a book written by psychologist James Mitchell about the prison. A section of the book does not name Haspel, but refers to a “chief of base” and uses the pronoun “he” when describing the chief of base at the time of the waterboarding.
In the book, the male chief of base told Zubaydah during an interrogation that he was faking his agony and then “congratulated him on his fine qualify of acting.” The section of the book says that the chief of base told Zubdaydah, “Good job! I like the way you’re drooling; it adds realism. I’m almost buying it. You wouldn’t think a grown man would do that.”
“We erroneously assumed that this was an effort by Mitchell or the agency to conceal the gender of the single official involved; it is not clear that Mitchell was referring to two different people,” ProPublica said in the correction. ProPublica also notes that the New York Times reported that another detainee, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who was accused of bombing the USS Cole, was waterboarded three times after Haspel arrived at the prison.
The correction from ProPublica comes after Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., on Wednesday said that he would “do everything I can” to prevent Haspel from becoming the head of the CIA and claimed that Haspel displayed “joyful glee” during an interrogation at the prison.
On Wednesday, prior to the ProPublica correction, a U.S. official told the Washington Examiner that Paul’s claims about Haspel were “not only inaccurate, but contradicted by the very source materials he relied on.”
“The senator quotes liberally from page 263 of James Mitchell’s book Enhanced Interrogation in describing the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah in claiming that Ms. Haspel was the CIA chief of base who was present and expressing joy at this interrogation,” the official said. “A reading of the same page demonstrates that the chief of base present and quoted during this event was a man, not Gina Haspel. This is just one of many false claims about Ms. Haspel being peddled by the uninformed.”
Paul still remains opposed to Haspel.
“Senator Rand Paul was quoting a Pulitzer-Prize winning reporter,” Doug Stafford, Paul’s spokesperson, said in a statement. “Regardless of the retraction of one anecdote, the fact remains that Gina Haspel was instrumental in running a place where people were tortured. According to multiple published, undisputed accounts, she oversaw a black site and she further destroyed evidence of torture. This should preclude her from ever running the CIA.”
Trump revealed on Tuesday morning that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was being booted from his post and CIA director Mike Pompeo would take his place, if confirmed by Congress. Haspel was nominated Tuesday morning to replace Pompeo, and will be the first female CIA director if she is confirmed.
