David Chasteen is a veteran of the CIA, who has also served in combat with the United States Army in Iraq, and elsewhere.
David just tweeted what amounts to the best response I’ve seen yet to
Gina Haspel’s behavior during her Senate confirmation hearing earlier
this week. Didn’t watch it on CSPAN or read the hot takes? Here’s what
she did: deny, obfuscate, justify, lie.
Haspel is President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Central Intelligence
agency. She was involved in the destruction of CIA tapes that
documented waterboarding of war-on-terror detainees, and she was
involved in other agency endeavors that amounted to torture.
Haspel this week said torture is passé, and she wouldn’t okay it now as
CIA chief. This former rank-and-file CIA guy calls BS.
During
CIA training in 2013, I was instructed that CIA officers are allowed to
violate US law while conducting operations. I pushed back against this
interpretation during class and was reprimanded for doing so. I have no
reason to believe that that training has changed.
In
the Army, I received training on not just my right but my
responsibility to disobey unlawful or immoral orders. No such training
was part of the CIA’s curriculum for DO officers during my tenure from
2006 to 2014. This is not part of the culture.
All
nations’ intelligence agencies (and armies) break FOREIGN laws because
espionage (and invasion) isn’t legal. That’s par for the course. But
where soldiers have a rich tradition of moral philosophy, the CIA tends
to respond with “we were just following orders.”
We
hanged Nazis who used this defense. If the CIA is going to inculcate a
tradition of respect for the rule of law, it’s going to require a
significant change in curriculum and some intelligence equivalent of
courts martial empowered to actually enforce that law in the field.
