Who's Gina Haspel?
I hope congress reads this before they interview her for the CIA job.
This article is a little over a year old, but still timely.
The New C.I.A. Deputy Chief’s Black-Site Past
By Dexter Filkins February 3, 2017
From 2003 to 2005, Gina Haspel was a senior official overseeing a top-secret C.I.A. program that subjected dozens of suspected terrorists to savage interrogations, which included depriving them of sleep, squeezing them into coffins, and forcing water down their throats. In 2002, Haspel was among the C.I.A. officers present at the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, an Al Qaeda suspect who was tortured so brutally that at one point he appeared to be dead.
On Thursday, the Trump Administration announced that Haspel would become the C.I.A.’s new deputy director.
It appears that the debate about torture in the President’s mind, if there ever was one, is over.
Haspel, a career C.I.A. employee, took part in another of the agency’s darkest moments: the destruction, in 2005, of video tapes of the interrogation of Zubaydah and a second suspect, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, at whose torture she was present, three years before.
Because Haspel’s new job is exempt from congressional confirmation, it’s doubtful she will ever have to publicly answer questions about her role in what amounts to America’s dirty war.
John Sifton, a senior official at Human Rights Watch, said the significance of Haspel’s appointment lies in the fact that she was intimately involved in the secret C.I.A. program known by its initials, R.D.I.—rendition, detention, and interrogation. Through the program, the C.I.A. not only tortured suspects but kidnapped them from various places around the globe and often delivered them to third-party countries that tortured them.
“You are putting a person in a leadership position who was centrally involved in an illegal program,” Sifton told me. President Barack Obama ordered the closure of the secret prisons, or black sites, in 2009.
A former government official, who spoke to me on condition of anonymity, said that the promotion of Haspel amounted to the C.I.A.’s revenge. “The agency is giving the finger to anyone who was ever critical of the program,” the former official said.
more:
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-new-c-i-a-deputy-chiefs-black-site-past
DO SOMETHING!
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