Gina Haspel refused to say Wednesday during her confirmation hearing to be CIA director if she oversaw the waterboarding of terrorism suspect Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri in 2002.
Haspel reportedly became chief of base at a CIA black site in Thailand in October of that year. Nashiri arrived in November and was waterboarded at least three times before being transferred in December to a different facility, according to a Senate Intelligence Committee report.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who was influential in drafting an intelligence committee report partially released in 2014, asked Haspel to give a “yes or no” answer to whether she oversaw the waterboarding of Nashiri.
[Opinion: The parade of falsehoods about CIA nominee Gina Haspel]
Haspel declined to give a direct answer, but appeared to suggest that non-public details would absolve her of involvement.
“Senator, anything about my classified assignment history throughout my 33 years we can talk about in this afternoon’s classified session,” Haspel told Feinstein.
Haspel continued: “It has been suggested to me by my team that if we tried to declassify some of my operational history it would help my nomination. I said that we could not do that. It is very important that the director of the Central Intelligence Agency adhere to the same classification guidelines that all employees must adhere to because there are very good reasons for those classification guidelines. Exposing operational information can be damaging to sources and methods, as you know, but there is also a physical risk to officers who go out to the far ends of the globe and conduct dangerous missions, and they believe their participation in those dangerous missions will be protected.
“It would be a security risk if we started declassifying associations between CIA officers and particular terrorists or terrorist operations, so I’m adhering to the existing guidelines. And I believe that it is important and that I could not stand before the CIA if I sought, for short-term gain, to declassify my operational history.”
Navy Lt. Alaric Piette, a military defense attorney representing Nashiri, who is now detained at Guantanamo Bay, said he could not comment. Attorneys working with inmates at the facility have access to some classified information, but can’t freely share it.
Piette blasted Haspel for a “failure to stand up for what’s right,” however, in a Monday statement to the Washington Examiner.
“I was an enlisted sailor during 9/11 and I understand the impulses that led people to want to torture,” Piette said. “However, the purpose of leadership is to be able to stand up for what’s right in tough times. Ms. Haspel did not do that. Failure to stand up for what’s right is not toughness. In a time when we needed professionalism and leadership, we got torture instead.”
Haspel recently was exonerated by some media outlets of an alleged role in the waterboarding of al Qaeda suspect Abu Zubaydah, but those reports noted she was chief of base at the Thailand facility when Nashiri was waterboarded.
Nashiri is a Saudi citizen and alleged mastermind of the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole at the Port of Aden, Yemen, which killed 17 U.S. sailors. He was captured in Dubai in 2002. Nashiri reportedly has intellectual disabilities, with one interrogator calling him “the dumbest terrorist I have ever met,” according to the memoir Hard Measures by former CIA National Clandestine Service Director Jose Rodriguez.
It’s unclear what role, if any, Haspel had in Nashiri’s treatment after he left Thailand. At the subsequent facility, believed to be in Poland, interrogators “placed al-Nashiri in a ‘standing stress position’ with ‘his hands affixed over his head’ for approximately two and a half days” and “placed a pistol near al Nashiri’s head and operated a cordless drill near al-Nashiri’s body,” according to the Senate intelligence committee report.
Much of Haspel’s confirmation hearing focused on her views about the use of harsh interrogation tactics after 9/11, and on her role ordering the 2005 destruction of more than 90 interrogation tapes.
It’s unclear if Haspel can get 51 votes needed for confirmation, and she reportedly offered to withdraw her nomination Friday after the White House learned new details about her alleged role in harsh interrogation tactics critics call torture. Ultimately, she did not withdraw.
