President Trump’s nominee to lead the CIA, Gina Haspel, told senators Wednesday that the 9/11 attacks made her and others in the intelligence community felt like they failed to protect Americans.
“I think everyone in the U.S. government, probably across the board, but certainly in the intelligence community and FBI, we all felt that we had let the American people down somehow,” she told the Senate Intelligence Committee at her confirmation hearing Wednesday. “We didn’t know these attacks were coming, and it was very important to identify who… was behind these attacks, and stop future attacks.”
“I think for probably every American it was all so surreal,” she said when asked about her reaction to 9/11. “But what I was very worried about, and we weren’t wrong about this, is that other attacks were being planned.”
Haspel, 61, was a counterterrorism official at the CIA during the 9/11 attacks in 2001.
She has faced criticism for her oversight of enhanced interrogation techniques in Thailand in 2002, which led to several questions from Democrats at the Wednesday hearing.
