On Lawfare, Stephen Rickard and Elisa Massimino, in reaction to Benjamin Wittes’ support of Gina Haspel’s nomination to the position of CIA Director, have a telling remark:
For this reason, Haspel’s involvement with the RDI program calls into question her ability not only to stand up to the president but to be an effective leader within the agency. She was promoted to the Deputy Director of the CIA, but, as Sen. Dianne Feinstein has said, “the top position is another matter entirely.” The Senate is evaluating her ability to make sound moral, ethical, and strategic judgments under intense pressure. How, for instance, can Haspel be expected to foster a culture at the CIA where officers are encouraged to resist political pressures or orders to engage in legally and morally dubious conduct if one of her major arguments against her critics is that she was “just following orders” when she helped destroy evidence and facilitated torture?
Haspel is reportedly hard-working, dedicated and effective. But she applied those talents over several years to support and assist Jose Rodriguez, and by all accounts there was never a more gung-ho advocate of brutal interrogations in the agency. She was, as Rodriguez puts it in his memoir, his “right arm.”
Bold mine. That’s an excellent discussion of the problem Haspel would face in a less partisan Senate. Of course, the problem of discerning legal vs illegal orders can be a difficult issue, and this issue came with an added thumb on the scales, a legal opinion that the interrogation methods to be used were legal.
But this doesn’t free Haspel from criticism, but makes it even more significant. The post-Bush Administration world has concluded that those methods were, in fact, torture. Haspel’s failure to discern this fact in a situation in which she was intimately involved can only leave one to wonder how much she was motivated by professionalism, and how much by the vengeance mindset of the Bush Administration, a mindset ultimately damaging to the position of the United States in terms of prestige and influence.
I’ll be very uncomfortable with Haspel in this position.
