Updated at 10:31 p.m. on April 21
President Trump has picked agency veteran Gina Haspel to replace Mike Pompeo as CIA director. Her candidacy has the support of every CIA director in recent memory — including John Brennan and Mike Morrell — and the overwhelming majority of CIA employees.
You might expect, then, that reporters would be objective in their Haspel-related reporting.
You’d be wrong.
In a number of pieces over the past few weeks, we’ve seen repeated errors of reporting on Haspel’s record. Some journalists have corrected their mistakes but others, well, not so much.
On Wednesday, the Daily Beast ran a story relying on a book written by a former senior CIA counsel, John Rizzo. According to the Beast, Rizzo “indicated that Haspel was responsible for the incommunicado detention and torture not of two men, but of dozens, potentially. Former intelligence officials interviewed by The Daily Beast have portrayed Haspel’s experience similarly.”
That’s big news if true. But it’s not. It misrepresents Rizzo’s claims.
On Friday afternoon, Rizzo provided the Washington Examiner with a copy of an email he sent to the Daily Beast’s editors on Friday morning: “I want to make clear that I never intended to suggest in my book that Gina Haspel was in charge of CIA’s interrogation program. She was not. I have nothing further to say on this subject other than to stress that I fully support her nomination to be CIA Director.”
The Beast article written by an otherwise superb reporter, Spencer Ackerman, has not yet been updated.
This, however, is just one example.
Consider that on March 15, ProPublica posted a retraction of an earlier piece which misreported key details on Haspel’s record. The retraction explained that the incorrect reporting had “said that Haspel, a career CIA officer who President Trump has nominated to be the next director of central intelligence, oversaw the clandestine base where Zubaydah was subjected to waterboarding and other coercive interrogation methods that are widely seen as torture. The story also said she mocked the prisoner’s suffering in a private conversation. Neither of these assertions is correct and we retract them.”
That retraction then led to NPR’s retraction on ProPublica-reliant reporting.
Then there’s the New York Times, which, in both a reporting article and an editorial, accused Haspel of overseeing the torture of a senior al Qaeda figure. The Times retracted and corrected.
Driving forwards, on Friday, the Times published a weird report suggesting that the CIA was engaged in spy games to get Haspel appointed. Here’s a question for the Times: Why is it weird that an agency wants one of its own in the top job?
Here’s another question: If the Times is truly concerned about Trump’s relationship with the truth, surely it should welcome a professional head of the CIA rather than an ideological outsider?
Next, enter the Washington Post, which published an opinion piece by former CIA officer John Kiriakou. In that piece, Kiriakou — who now works for Sputnik, a Kremlin media mouthpiece — accuses Haspel of being some kind of CIA torture freak. The article still stands uncorrected.
But perhaps the worst offender is the normally excellent Dexter Filkins in the New Yorker. In a February 2017 piece that remains uncorrected, Filkins wrongly claims that Haspel was present at the Zubaydah interrogations.
Ultimately, of course, it will be up to the Senate to decide whether Haspel deserves a shot at leading the CIA. But the facts, as reported, will matter greatly in shaping senator viewpoints and the public attitude towards Haspel.
Unfortunately, at present, the facts are hidden and things seem set to get worse.
It’s a big mistake. Haspel deserves appointment as the director of central intelligence.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this post said a public relations firm run by a former Obama administration official, Stephanie Cutter, was retained by groups like Code Pink to besmirch Gina Haspel’s name. This is untrue and the story has been corrected.
