Trump fired secretary of state Rex Tillerson, replacing him with CIA
director Mike Pompeo. He nominated deputy director Gina Haspel to lead
the CIA. If the Senate confirms her, she’ll be the first woman to direct
the CIA. Quartz offers some background on her:
In 2002, she oversaw a secret prison in Thailand that
tortured two terrorism suspects. That torture took place within the
CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” program, in which suspected terrorists
are sent to US allies, and interrogated in “black sites” on their soil.
One of the men, known as Abu Zubayda, was waterboarded 83 times
in one month and was slammed into walls by the head. He was deprived of
sleep and kept in a coffin-like box. Interrogators later decided he
didn’t have any useful information.
ProPublica found that Haspel personally signed cables to CIA headquarters that detailed Zubayda’s interrogation.
CIA videos of the torture were destroyed in 2005, on the orders
of a cable drafted by Haspel. Her then-boss Jose Rodriguez, the CIA’s
director of operations for counterterrorism, signed off on the order.
“The cable left nothing to chance. It even told them how to get rid of
the tapes,” he wrote in his memoir, according to ProPublica. “They were
to use an industrial-strength shredder to do the deed.”
The European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, a
Berlin-based NGO, has been pushing Germany’s public prosecutor to arrest
Haspel for her role in the torture program.
