Pod Save the World - The CIA's tortured history

Episode Date: April 27, 2018

Tommy talks with ACLU political director Faiz Shakir about the nomination of Gina Haspel to lead the CIA despite her role in the Bush-era torture of terrorism suspects. They also discuss the politics of national security in the Trump era, and whether Obama did enough to hold the CIA accountable for its actions.

Welcome back to Pod Save the World. This is Tommy Vitor. Thank you guys for tuning in. As always, my conversation today is about Gina Haspel, who is the woman Donald Trump is nominated to head the CIA. She was involved in the Bush era torture programs in a very personal hands-on way. And the ACLU and my guest, Fasheqir, have come out strongly in opposition to her nomination because of that stain on our nation's history and because of her role in that work. We talked about Haspel and her record, but the conversation actually transitioned. into a broader one about the politics of national security and how they may or may not be shifting, why Democrats never seem to stand up and fight in these tough moments. And President Obama's record on civil liberties issues and whether he should have done more to demand

accountability for those who were involved in torture and whether that failure has gotten us to where we are today, where you're seeing people who worked on these programs rising to more senior positions at the agency. It was a great conversation. I really appreciate his deeply principled view. We pushed each other hard on a whole bunch of things. And it was a fiery back and forth that I think is worth listening to. So here's the interview. On the line from Washington, D.C., is Fas Shakir. He is the ACLU, the American Civil Liberties Union's national political director. And I am very grateful that he is joining me today. Fas, thanks again. Hi, Tommy. How are you? I am good. So President Trump recently has made a whole bunch of moves

on national security. One of them is nominating Gina Haspel, the current deputy director of the CIA, to succeed Mike Pompeo as director once he becomes Secretary of State, which is going to happen because Republican Democrats all caved. She would be the first appointed female CIA director, which is a big deal. We do not want to minimize that. But we also don't know much about her bio because she spent her career in the clandestine service, and most of it is still classified. but it's safe to say she's essentially a lifelong CIA officer who would bring a lot of experience to the job in the building, but that in and of itself brings some challenges. You guys, the ACLU, have come out strongly in opposition to her nomination because of her role in the CIA's so-called enhanced interrogation program,

which is a lame euphemism for torture. What do you think that senators and listeners need to know about her record and why you guys oppose the nomination? Well, we don't necessarily endorse or oppose candidates by board policy, We have serious concerns about her, and we've made those clear. We made those clear to members of the Senate. And basically it boils down to this, that Gina Haspel is a new low in our democracy, that if you go down this role of confirming somebody like Gina Haspel, you're essentially condoning torture.

You're saying for the first time that we're going to knowingly accept and approve someone who engaged in criminal acts, criminal behavior. knowing all that information, you're still going to give her a Senate endorsement. That is absurd to me. So I think, you know, we have two windows into what Gina Haspel has done. Those two windows go as follows. Window number one, during the period of 2002, she oversaw torture in Thailand at a black site prison. in one case overseeing the program that was torturing Abu Zabeda. In another case, she purportedly was on the ground in the torturing of Al Nassiri. So those are one element that we could talk about.

The second element is later in 2005, she oversaw the destruction of tapes that provided the evidence of what she had done. And that in itself, the cover-up, the criminal behavior of ridding and killing the evidence, that in itself could be disqualifying, but she has done both ends of it. And those are the two things that we know of from the public record of her. There is plenty more that we don't know of, much of which, hopefully we're going to learn through the Senate hearing. And I hope the senators will press for more information about her. Right. So let's start with the first half of this, which is the torture itself. can you define torture and what specifically she did or oversaw with respect to the detainees that you named?

Yeah. So it's overseeing Abu Zabeda's torture. I mean, there's somebody who was waterboarded a lot, hundreds of times from what we understand. Literally waterboarded every few hours. He was, they had kept a water rag over his face so that he wouldn't actually know when the next water bordering would occur. He was just sitting there in paralysis and fear. He was engaged in sensory deprivation, stripped naked, basically not allowed to sleep. They blared music in there, kept lights on all night.

From what we understand, had wooden boxes that they would throw him into, coffin-sized boxes and lock him in there. Again, for long periods of time, just to disorient him and to torture him. They would take him and throw him up against the wall. face first. And these kinds of acts are what we're talking about when we say torture. They are all in violation of treaty obligations that the United States has partaken in. They are all violations of U.S. law. And nevertheless, we carried them out. It was a blight on the United States' name. We all, I think, recognized that after the fact. We passed even more laws to put this into place. We condemned torture. We saw this as the black spot on a record that it was.

And it's disheartening and disorienting to say the least that here we are suggesting that years after torture had occurred in our name that we're going to endorse it again. Yeah. We don't know that she was on the ground. And there was some misreporting, right, about whether she was on the ground during Abu Zabedas torture sessions. She almost certainly oversaw the program. Just think about that. She was a big deal, right? So this block site in Thailand is a small place that literally had one prisoner, maybe like a few CIA staff. She's a much bigger deal than that. She wasn't, I don't think, on the ground, but she was certainly overseeing the program. That's what we understand from the reporting. Then later, she was actually on the ground on site for the torture on the shiri in which he was waterboarded as well. And so, again, these acts themselves would be disqualifying. There's a lot of them all piled in together. under one person. Yeah.

Listen, I mean, I couldn't agree with you more about torture itself. It is a stain on our nation's history that it ever happened. Barack Obama banned it from ever happening again, so I'm there. But I'm going to play a lot of devil's advocate in this interview because I think it makes for a better conversation. Please do. What would you say to the folks who claim, listen, the Office of Legal Counsel sent memos over to the CIA and to other components of the government that said these techniques,

which they called enhanced interrogation techniques in most Orwellian way possible. But these torture techniques were legal were justified and that the CIA officers were just following orders. What's your response to that claim? One of the things you need to realize about what happened there

is that even when the torture was going on in Thailand in this black site of Abu Zabeda, there were CIA officers on the ground who were upset about what was happening. There was discord in the ranks amongst themselves about whether we should be doing it, people begging off of it and saying that this isn't right. And in that moment, what was the leadership saying? The leadership, in this case, it was Gina Haspel saying, no, keep pushing ahead, keep pushing the envelope. Let's go outside

the boundaries of the law because of the sense of immediate danger and the need to get information. I want to unpack that real quick, which is how do we know? that? Is that from people who were with her at the time, press reporting? Like, how do we know that she was pushing the envelope? And what specifically was her job? So the most important detailed reporting on this comes from the Senate Intelligence report on torture. And I played some minor role in that. I worked for Senator Harry Reid. Senator Feinstein staff was critical in both writing it when she was the leader of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Her staff had helped write this report. It documented in thorough detail the acts that had occurred. and the sad part of it, and this is where I can play devil's advocate with you, Tommy, is that during the course of it, the administration opposed naming the individuals who had carried out those acts. And as you well know, a person who I respected and admired Dennis McDonough, who was a White House chief of staff at the time, came over and made a vigorous case that we should not

name names here. We should not reveal the people who carried out. the torture. And for that reason, Gina Haspel's name was certainly redacted from the report, and therefore a lot of what we should know, we can't because of the redactions. I would hope that as a result of this hearing, that we're going to learn more about it. And obviously, you know how I feel about the redactions themselves. I think it was a kind of a cover-up that makes it harder to hold torture accountable. And again, I don't want to keep going down the rabbit hole with you, devil's advocate. But I think in general, a president who I admired and President Obama,

I think this is one of those areas that I just had a disagreement with him on personally. I think he took the approach very early on to say, we're going to look past torture. What was done in the past is in the past. I'm looking forward. And we're not going to necessarily hold accountable the things and the people that had carried them out because those were different times and different context, I'm going to turn the page on history. Yeah. And what happens as a result of that kind of decision is that the people who are the architects not only stay in place are rewarded and then continue to move up the change and are now

literally a step away from becoming the CIA director. I'd love to continue with the sort of Obama's role in that report and what was or was not redacted and what was not released a little later in this conversation because I think it's an important conversation. But building off of what you said, I mean, Obama's final CIA director, John Brennan, who also worked at the CIA during that period in a role called deputy executive director. I worked with John at the White House. I talked with him about these issues a lot. He said he had knowledge of harsh interrogation tactics being used and that he verbally opposed them at the time, but wasn't in a job where he could stop them from happening. He wasn't like a seat at the table in a policy role.

He also later then helped Obama ban the practice. but I know that the ACLU strongly opposed John's nomination at that time. And I raise him because I'm curious where do you think we should draw the lines in terms of who was permanently tainted by their association with the CIA at that time? Is it anyone who worked on these programs? Is it just folks who did the interrogating or oversaw it? Is it CIA leadership? I mean, how do you think we should think about, you know, accountability when it comes to these torture programs? I think that there needs to be a level of accounting.

for your own self in the sense that we need to make clear what you believe in and what you don't believe in. And I can understand John Brennan's argument that, okay, well, I didn't have a direct role, so I shouldn't be tainted by it. And then I would argue that then there's an incumbent responsibility on himself to condemn that which he was not part of. And to say that it will not occur again. I hear you on that as he came into office, he did help take actions that made clear that torture shouldn't happen on our watch. I think as I look at Gina Haspel, she's in a very different category than John Brennan.

She was the person who had policy control, who had directional control over this. And I guess to your friend John Brennan, who I think has a remarkable career in government service and as somebody you know better than I, a serious and a professional person, I think there's many who have relationships with Gina Haspel and that because of those relationships

feel compromised in a moral way, I would argue, that they are willing to look past criminal acts in order to support someone deemed to be a friend, someone deemed to have helped them in some other capacity. I don't doubt that there's many things in Gina Haspel's record in which she has done wonderful things to try to preserve the security of the United States. But there are instances that are, I think, verging on disqualification. When you engage in criminal behavior, illegal torture, that I think you got to draw a red line around. And you need to make somebody held accountable. I mean, to my friends who operate in different spheres around, you know, bank accountability and people who crash the economy, you're essentially arguing the same things.

For something heinous that occurred, there must and should be some people who deserve direct accountability for the actions that we believed were wrong in our name. Going to the politics for a second. There's already a TV ad slamming Rand Paul for not supporting Haspel's nomination. It literally accuses him of siding with terrorists over the American people. It's a very subtle spot. You can find it on YouTube. What do you make of this ad? Is this a warning? Is this a shot across about to Democrats to say if you vote against Haspel, this garbage is coming to your district next? Yeah. And I think we should invite that. Like, hey, This is the politics that you want to play? Let's bring it on. And I think, you know, from my

perspective, this is the kind of public rendering on torture that we need to have happen. We need to have people weigh in and understand what's at risk here. We've got essentially the Dick Cheney worldview popping itself back up. We've got a person in Donald Trump whose instincts all of us have great fear about. Somebody who has said openly that he wants to waterboard again, doesn't believe it's to be torture and feels like torture works, which is a piece that we haven't gotten into, Tommy, whether the torture actually even worked and obviously it did not. So here you have a president whose instincts are already desirous of torture, picks to head the CIA, someone who has arguably one of the most detailed levels of engagement and ownership over torture.

and I think that this is something that every Democrat and Republican should be ready to be held account too. I would say, you know, looking at the Senate itself, Tommy, I mean, there's a number of people on both sides who have taken tough stands and saying that torture is not us. I mean, if you look at the votes that have occurred, McCain Feinstein, there was a vote that, you know, when President Obama issued the executive order saying that the Army Field Manual applies to intelligence agency personnel, McCain Feinstein, then in Beinstein. added that into law. That vote actually earned bipartisan support so people like Ted Cruz were supportive of it. I think, you know, you're in a situation where Steve Danes and Dean Heller, Jeff Flake, you know, Susan Collins and others, I think should, given their past records, be ready to once again say torture is not us. And that's, you know, never mind all the Democrats. I think I cannot understand for the life of me why any single Democrat would feel

compelled to give their vote on this one. Yeah, I mean, look, there is, there is in my mind a crystal clear moral argument against torture. There should be no debate about it. There's also, in my experience, a debate over the efficacy of torture. And I am not an interrogator. I've never sat on a CIA black side and asked someone questions. But I worked with people who did. And when I spoke to them, my understanding was that the best interrogators on the planet in the United

States, at least, were FBI interrogation teams. And while the media leads you to believe that the way you get information from somebody is from the show 24, when you twist their arm and chop off a finger until they tell you where the bomb is, in fact, what they would do was they would build a relationship, they would build trust, they would bring in their families, they would make clear to these individuals that the interrogator knew more about the situation than they ever would and that they were had and try to trick them, sort of slip them up. But, you know, fundamentally it involved trust and you cannot build trust with someone if you are, waterboarding them literally hundreds of times. It just does not work that way. In fact,

what often happened was they give disinformation. That's right. The second piece is exactly right. Essentially, after you start beating them up and throwing them up against the wall a hundred times, then they're just going to tell you anything that they want you to hear, right? They think you're asking for something. I'm just going to tell you whatever the heck it is you want to hear, so you'll actually make me stop this abuse. Right. I think, you know, all of this was illegal, right? right, Tommy, and I think the point of the law, and this is my perspective, my theoretical perspective on the law, is that it is the accumulation of learned human experience. When we declare something to be illegal and we make, in turn to treaty obligations, we don't do so just because, you know, we think, oh, you know, we shouldn't do those for moral reasons. They're also learned human experience. It's accumulation of it. And that the reason why we would ban torture, isn't simply just a moral one, is that we've learned having done it in the past, that it is ineffective and that there are better means to get the information, just as you suggest you laid it

out beautifully, that if you engage in a different manner, you actually get better results, and therefore let's ban the use of ineffective techniques that are also moral blights upon our conscience. And so, yeah, I totally agree with everything you said. So back to the politics for a minute. I mean, the politics of national security feel upside down right now. You have some Democrats pushing back on Haspel, but you have a president that constantly attacks the intelligence community. He constantly savages the FBI. He is crossed the line of the independence of the DOJ over and over and over again with no accountability.

It feels like a general distrust of institutions has pushed out the normal, reflexive calls to protect national security interests among Republican. voters. Do you agree with that? Do you think this is a Trump blip or is there a fundamental reordering of political views that we need to keep an eye on? So tell me a little bit about how you, I'm interested in that, that you think that essentially there's a chasm on the right, if I understand you correctly. Well, I mean, look, there's always been the sort of libertarian Rand Paul worldview that had enormous distrust in the intelligence community and law enforcement, et cetera. And I think, frankly, a healthy distrust of institutions, the I see, law enforcement is a good thing. I don't think we should attack their credibility the way the President of the United States does, but I do think it's good to

push them to question assumption. A healthy skepticism for sure, because in each of these agencies, they wield immense power, right? And there's some that is good that they do, but there's a lot that needs to be checked. And there's a lot of abuse that has had in the system. I mean, we could talk about FBI abuses for a long time. So I agree with you that having a watchdog, persistent, skeptical eye towards these agencies is healthy. Right. Then at the same time, you have a, you have a president United States. Right. The matter which Donald Trump is going about it is self-preservation for his for his own hide trying to demean any kind of accountability from the FBI or any other agency that's looking into him personally. Right. And so that we should see that for what it is,

which has tried to undermine entire agency's works and to demean professionals just for the very fact that they're carrying out investigation to him. That's exactly right. And what I'm wondering is will his attacks on those institutions, which are clearly self-interested, clearly in their name, diminish public standing in view of these institutions like the CIA or FBI so thoroughly that attacks like the ad we were just talking about against Rand Paul that accuse him of being, you know, soft on national security because he's not supporting the CIA nominee, will no longer work. I'm just wondering if we're seeing a sort of a fundamental reordering of national security politics that we haven't seen in a long time. I think that's right. I certainly think that what Donald Trump has done with this nomination, and he's trying to bring back the neoconservative wing into his foreign policy, whatever the hell his foreign policy is. I mean, you know, he ran

his campaign saying he was against the Iraq war, thought it was stupid. We can all debate, you know, know that that wasn't generally true. But nevertheless, that that's what he was talking about. It a different kind of foreign policy than you've heard from George W. Bush and other Republican nominees for president. So then he comes into office and you have a bit of a chasm with the Bill crystals of the world, right, the neoconservative lights who are very eagerly criticizing and attacking him. Then he, you know, selects a number of neoconservative folks to surround himself, not only John Bolton, but then Mike Pompeo and now Gina Hasble. And it feels like he's trying to bring back the, what I would argue is the war hawking side of the Republican Party into the ranks.

But I agree with you that the national security politics of playing this card are not popular. There's a reason why Donald Trump campaign on reducing our American footprint in many wars overseas, right? There's a reason why he was even talking about pulling out of Syria and pulling out of Iraq. he found those to generally be popular views even with his own base. And I think that there's going to be, at some point, a reckoning of his political rhetoric with the policy actions that he's talking about. I don't think that they're reconcilable. Of course, his base may not ultimately give a damn and then maybe just give him a pass. My greatest fear, Tommy, is that, you know, politics will get realigned entirely if and when, knock on where there's an emergency, right?

and you and I both know what that emergency might be. Yeah. In this day and age, the emergency that we're most worried about is a terror attack that is conducted out by a brown man shouting Allahou Akbar. If it's carried out by a white individual, right, or domestic terrorists who's shooting a gun in Las Vegas, apparently that doesn't count. It doesn't raise the ire of Donald Trump. He doesn't engage in extrajudicial action as a result. However, you and I both probably have the same fear that were it a brown man shouting al-Ahu Akbar or shooting a gun, from a Las Vegas hotel, we would see a Donald Trump spring into action wanting to push the

boundaries of what is lawful and then having around him a bunch of people who want to utilize the politics of the moment to engage in harmful actions. Right. Dust off the latest version of the Patriot Act and jam it through Congress, essentially. Yeah, to say the least. I mean, you could talk about all of his border actions. You could talk about his surveillance desires to look into people's phones, like the registry, of various peoples, never mind opening Guantanamo and sending people there, torture, the whole

nine years. I mean, you could just imagine with Tom Cotton at his side and, you know, a number of folks, John Bolton, they would just be coming up with all kinds of ways to, let's be honest, beat up on brown people, which has been, in my mind, the most animating element of the Donald Trump presidency. That's right. If there's one thing that you could say, hey, this is what he, he really, really cares about. This is what he really throws down over. It is when there are brown people's lives at risk, right? It's Mexicans are rapists and Muslims who need to be registered or banned from the United States. It's his first act in office on January 27th the week into his presidency. It's the thing that even now sanctuary city laws, the thing that he really feels like

heading into, if he were headed into a reelection campaign, want to continue to talk about openly with a great deal of oppression. I mean, even his tax cuts, he tosses aside, says, this is boring, right? This is not what I want to talk about. What I want to talk about is beating up on minority populations in the United States. This is his animating animus. And I think we all need to be worried about that and think of the nomination of Gina Haspel in that light. Right.

I mean, also, this seems to have drowned out a conversation about any other things that Haspel may be associated with. I mean, I have not heard any public debate or conversation about controversial, counterterrorism programs like the use of drones or the general use of kinetic force and counterterrorism, nor have I heard much conversation about the encryption debate over whether, you know, Apple, WhatsApp, Facebook should be encrypting communications end to end so that governments and others can't intercept those and read them. Have you heard Haskell comment on any of these issues and do you think they will become a part of her confirmation process? I think they will absolutely be part of the confirmation process. I have not heard her comment on it. We know very little about her stated views on this. I think that there's

grave concern over the CIA's use of the drone program, which you probably know even better than I about how it was carried out under President Obama, who had great concerns over whether, you know, the amount of authority that the CIA should have in carrying out a drone program, right? And now, from what we understand, the president has literally said hands off, you know, go for it, knock yourself out, carry out whatever you'd like. And we've seen an escalation in drone attacks and presumably large numbers of civilian deaths as a result. And the damage being done on the ground to both radicalization of populations and how our diplomatic relations are being managed as a result. You know, there's so many repercussions of that kind of action.

We could only imagine that given her inclinations to be very forward-leading on interrogation practices, is inverging into illegal and a lawful conduct, that there's no reason to believe that that coherent ideology also says that, well, all these actions that the CIA is undertaking in the act in the name of countering terrorism are also valid and lawful and deserve to just remain and continue expanded. I think one element that I didn't touch on, Tommy, that I want to make sure that people appreciate about this is that Abu Zabeda,

remember who is waterboard, I don't know, hundreds of times, right? He will never be charged in court. by the United States. He will never be charged. He will not be held accountable. There'll be no justice brought to him. He'll be locked away and get Mo in a black hole forever. And why is that? Because we tortured him. Right. So because we carried out that unlawful action that I think Gina Haspel is directly responsible for, there will be no legal justice in this case. And we'll never know what is the truth of what it was the way to do, what it did he not do. We can never try them in an article three court. And that's one of the effects of torturing people. Yeah, it's one of the effects

of torturing people. It's one of the legacies of Guantanamo Bay, which was one of the dumbest fucking experiments in the history of our national security state. Any effort to try people in military commissions as opposed to an article three court have generally failed. And there's less justice because of Gitmo rather than more. And it's a stain on our nation's legacy in history and a recruiting tool and all the other things. And yet, you know, the politics around it are so stupid still to this day that it drives me crazy. Yeah. Couldn't agree more. All of these things we're talking about are why I struggle with how I personally feel about this nomination. The legacy of torture is horrific. I could not agree with you more. But I also see Haspel as someone who, you know,

has a track record as a career professional who will know how to run the CIA. at a time when you could get some horrendous political hack conspiracy theorist as the person who comes after Haspel. And, you know, it's like that, that to me is a little bit. So I take the opposite approach as you here. I recognize that she is a talented professional. I think both you and I would probably agree that we have a president who generally has no idea what the hell his government is up to.

He's not sitting there reading briefing books about what the DOD is doing and what the Department of Labor. is doing today and what HHS is doing and asking for, you know, briefings on the various policy debates that are going on there. He's essentially deferring, and that deferring is putting it kindly. He just has no desire inclination if it doesn't involve him. He doesn't care. He's an idiot. And so you put into place in the CIA with some great authority, a person whose ideology you already have grave concerns about, who already carried out criminal behavior. And you say, you're going to be left on an island with great responsibility and exceptional know-how. And you're just going to be told,

knock yourself out. Go do whatever you do. And the only guidance you will be given is generally from a president who's saying, I don't really have any guardrails here. I don't really have any balance. So you feel free to do anything in my name that is, quote, quote, tough. And I'll back you up. So then you leave somebody who, because of her well-fell. of knowledge and her professional experience, I think you're putting in place a really dangerous problem. I think the Senate has a number of options. She is currently, by the way, the deputy director of the CIA.

So it's not like, you know, I don't, there's great concerns about her in that role. However, I would say you need a check on the president of the United States's instincts. You need a check on Gina Haspel's instincts in the director position. I mean, look, I host this show because I worked on. on Obama's national security staff for a couple years. You know, I was young. I was a spokesperson. I was not, you know, in operational meetings about agency activities.

But, you know, that experience, those conversations, they gave me a window into threats, into national security, the decision making. And it gave me an understanding and an empathy for people who might have made a horrific mistake in those scary months after 9-11. But, you know, also, like, I did not grow up in a household that was like reflexively pro-government, actually the opposite. My aunt's first husband was a journalist. He worked for the Boston Globe and got a copy of the Pentagon papers and the FBI ended up tapping his phone. They broke into their house. You know, so I was more of an ACLU household. You know, so I see this from very complicated perks. So I see your argument. But then I imagine some host of Fox and Friends being named CIA director and you had this compliant Senate pushing them through. And like, I don't know. I wonder if we wouldn't benefit from someone that at least is professional. I don't know. I think I would vote. against her because of the legacy of torture and because of what an enormous stain it was on

our history. But at the very least, I see it as being really complicated. Torture and then, and then destroying of the evidence and the tapes as well. You know, Tommy, I hear everything you're saying and you're saying, okay, can we make an argument that somehow she might have evolved that, like that, okay, there was one moment in time where you might have done something that do you have regret over? I don't know. Have you evolved in any way? Well, the record doesn't suggest that whatsoever. You know, three or four years later, you're actively trying to hunt down the tapes and destroy them. You send the cable saying to people in Thailand, destroy all those 92 tapes you got over there of all the evidence. She's lobbying the CIA General Counsel John

Rizzo to, can we please destroy these things? And then years later, when the Senate is producing a torture report, she, amongst many CIA staff are lobbying the White House, lobbying Dennis McDonough directly and saying, please for the love of God, do not let our names be known. We cannot be outed in this manner. I see all that conduct as, you learned nothing, you were not held accountable, you've just been essentially rewarded. I would argue it's even worse than that, too. I'd argue it's worse because the institution, the CIA, is refusing to declassify information to this day at this moment about her record, about where she worked. Yeah. And they're asking senators to come over to their skiff in Langley and review documents there, but there's no way to have a public accountability.

Just the senators, right, Tommy? Yeah, right. I think it's just them because they have clearance. Yeah, so they won't even let the staff come over. And only the members of the Senate Intelligence Committee are allowed to come over and see documents. So they are really limiting the information and they just don't want to have a public debate about any. And it's amazing. You put up a nominee who in your mind, Tommy, if we accepted the kind of counter argument here

that you have a professional who's done a bunch of wonderful things, then you would want to have a open conversation about the things that she has done and that the CIA has done. But in fact, if you look at their actions, they are running away, hiding from it and twisting and thwarting it. So they'll reveal very selectively pieces of her bio from many, many, many moons ago. They're like, oh, she's a wonderful actor against the Soviet Union or something. You're like, great. Well, tell me what she did during the Bush era. Well, you're right.

Could you tell me a little bit about that? And it's, again, it's even worse because the New York Times has this piece from a couple days ago about how the CIA is running essentially a covert effort to get former CIA agents and officers out to talk on the record about how great she was, how good she'll be for the country, while they are stonewalling Congress, refusing to declassified documents or talk about what she did in her years of clandestine service. So they're trying to have it both ways. Yeah, I mean, they're engaging in an intelligence operation. right, sharing and planting the information about her that they think is most favorable in that light. They're using all of their official government agency resources to go to the hilt for her. And that's one thing if we could get the full record. I mean, there is actually a Senate Intelligence Committee report that is full of backup documents that you well know, right,

that the Trump administration, Republican members of the Senate have refused to disclose. You know, we had to fight just to get the kind of 500-page summary out there. And then you remember Richard Burr, now the Senate Intelligence Committee chairman, then asked the government to destroy the records of that report and to basically remove it from the public record. And so here we have this report available that the Senate themselves created, the senators themselves created, documenting this whole period in our history. And even that can't be revealed. Yeah.

So, like, you're starting with the Senate report. And then like the CIA information that is the wealth of the information out there, none of that is, of course, being allowed into the public domain. I was gone. I led left the government by the time this torture report was being debated. But I was deeply frustrated with the way my former colleagues handled it. I wish we had called a torture. I wish we had released what we need to release because I do think full transparency and accountability

is the way to move on from these issues and really back up the president. belief that this was a stain under history and never should happen. It should never happen again, period, paragraph. I don't get why that was so hard. Totally agree with you. I mean, so tell me, like, tell me you were there early, right? What years were? Was it in 2009? I left in March of 2013. But were you there from 09 to 13? I was there from 09 to 13, but I took on the NSC job in January of 2011. So that's when I got, you know, fully cleared and put onto the stuff. I mean, I just wanted to return to one and I don't mean, I just, I'm kind of interested in your

thoughts about like the idea that we would, you know, look past torture and turn the page on history. From your perspective, was that kind of like a debated decision that we, you kind of wrangled over and said, you know, we have an agenda that we need to work on. We can't allow, you know, it to be thwarted. We're in the midst of an economic crisis. There's a lot of things going on here. We can't be mired into a debate around torture and who should be held accountable. Do you think that that generally was the reason why president decided, you know, we're going to move on and not hold people accountable? I think there was a clear focus for the first couple of years in terms of public messaging to always be talking about economic issues and what he was doing to fix the economy and create jobs. And so that's sort of one basket of issues.

I think with respect to accountability at the CIA itself over these torture programs, I mean, Obama was so clearly on record calling it torture. saying he would ban it and prevent it never happening again that that was not up for debate and it was unequivocal i think what happens is you have a whole suddenly you you sit in the oval office or you go to langley and you have a dozen people in your office that you're talking to who were there at the time and they're helping explain to you that they got an o lc memo that told them to do this and they marched out on orders based on you know what they were told from cheney's office or whatever you have conversations about what it means to the cia workforce which is a a group of people who essentially most of them can't talk about what they do ever in their lives.

They never get credit for, you know, helping stop terrorist attacks or whatever it is, you know, work that they've done that's been successful. But they were getting the shit kicked out of them for a long time over Iraq intelligence, over the horrific enhanced interrogation techniques, et cetera, right? And so you have a workforce that is playing this critical role that needs to continue to bring people into the building that are new and smart and no Arabic and can, you know, travel overseas and not make a lot of money and do these jobs. And there's a morale challenge that is pervasive across sort of the national security world. So you're just sort of

debating these things. Like is accountability for what was done more important? We're getting the best people you can find in the door to do the job tomorrow and the next day. And I think that's hard. It's a fucking hard question. And my response, again, as someone who respects and admires the job that President Obama did, is that is someone who got elected, I remember one of my most favorite quotes from him during the campaign trail was we don't want to just end the war. We want to end the mindset that got us into these wars. I think that there was an indication and even a passion from him during the campaign trail about being a shapeshifter on foreign policy and national security issues that never fully arose once he became president, partly for the

reasons that you're suggesting, that economic issues just landed on his lap day one and it just had to suck his time into that and then off to health care we went and there were just a bunch of other things. And really, it wasn't until much later in his presidency that he, it felt like you're having any kind of real debate around foreign policy trajectory by the time we got around to Iran deal, right? But for many, many years, you get Leon Panetta come into the CIA. You have a bunch of people, David Petraeus, sorry, at some point. You have people who I think, from my perspective, again, I wasn't in the seat, right? So I don't know. I was in the White House. I'm sitting there from the outside watching. I'm looking. I'm

looking at an administration that in the president essentially saying, I want to build good relationships with people in the intelligence field, people in the Pentagon, people in national security work. And I'm not sure I want to alienate and antagonize many of these folks. So therefore, I'm not going to essentially hold people accountable for some of the things they did because I'm going to need these alliances. And as a result of that, I think that's why you have expansions of a drone program. I think that's why you have, you know, some of the torture advocates continually moving up the chain and getting rewarded. You have expansions of special forces operations across the globe, right? And generally, mission creep of the military in many ways. I think that the

kind of unwillingness early on to be a shape shifter on national security, foreign policy, debates and decisions ended up hurting the trajectory of what was possible. And then it wasn't until by the time the Iran deal came around that you really did see the president sing his teeth into trying to really move the dial. And when you saw what he could do, when he put his resources to it and the eloquence and the willpower behind, you could see what power he had to move the bureaucracy. I think there's some truth to what you're saying. I think that the financial crisis was a Black Swan event that sucked up time and mindshare and policy, you know, capital in a way that no one could possibly have anticipated. That said, if you've been listening closely to the president

during the campaign, you knew that he called the war in Afghanistan, the war we need to win. He talked about destroying al-Qaeda and Afghanistan and Pakistan. So one should have assumed that he would send more troops, that he would increase counterterrorism operations in that area and generally increase the focus in that region. At the same time, he announced the deadline of December 31, 2011 to get all U.S. troops out of Iraq. So while we were sending more folks to Afghanistan in that region, he was getting all of our troops out of Iraq,

which was not a popular decision, but it was keeping with a campaign promise. You were absolutely right that in the second term, you have a hell of a lot more running room to do things like the Iran deal. And frankly, the Iran deal took seven years of sanctions and really hard diplomacy to get us to that point, right? So I don't know that you could have done it earlier, but Cuba, for example. You could have made moves on Cuba a hell of a lot faster,

but I think the politics push that down the road a little bit. So I think there's some truth to what you're saying, but I think a lot of it goes to the expectations that people understandably put on Barack Obama. Use the word shapeshifter. I would use the word, you know, Rortec test. I think a lot of people saw in him what they wanted to see and hope that he could do more to sort of fix. the world with a snap of his thumb than he was able to, especially with Mitch McConnell,

making his sole job blocking whatever Obama wanted to do. Yeah. And I didn't mean to make this a referendum on President Obama in any regard, except to say that, like, now Gina Haspel is going to be a step away from CIA director. And that's not President Obama's fault per se, right? Yes. She did. I think there were steps that you could have taken to hold her more accountable, but it is Trump's

responsibility, right? He's electing her as the director. And I think ultimately he is the one that I think. ultimately he is the one that I think we should be most focused on and whose instincts we are most wary of. Yeah. And look, just to clarify, like, if I was a U.S. Senator, I would have voted against Pompeo at CIA. I would vote against him at state and I would vote against Gina Hasbola. I am so sick of Democrats being scared to vote against these ideologues for vague political reasons. You get hit politically when you don't look like you have confidence in what you believe in.

Regardless. Stand up for something. Speak out about it. and vote your conscience, and I think you will be rewarded by voters. Do not fear these bullshit ads that are running against Rand Paul because I don't think they're going to be effective this time around. And they're going to run regardless, right? Yeah, exactly. Whether you vote for or against who the hell it cares, right?

They've got a strategy and approach. Yeah, they're going to attack you either way. So you've got to find your moral conscious that you want to be able to defend. And I guess for the life being like, I don't understand the argument why you wouldn't want to assert and campaign on asserting. some accountability and check on Trump. Absolutely. Right.

In general, you have, I think, an argument against a president who's acting against the rule of law, who wants to violate checks and balances, who, you know, for a variety of reasons, acts unconstitutionally. And I think the public generally gets that. And if you wanted to frame an argument around, hey, you know, we're not going to let this president act unconstitutionally. I'm not going to allow him to, you know, a select torture as a CIA director. that has sailed to me. I don't understand why. I agree. Whether you're John Tester in Montana,

Heidi High Kim, North Dakota, Joe Manchin at West Virginia, I have a hard time convincing me you could not actively go out of there and successfully tell that message. Yeah, man. Voters are sick of the chaos they're seeing from Washington. They want a return to some sort of normal semblance of politics without the crazy tweets and the lashing out, but they also want a check on Donald Trump. They want someone to stand up to him and to push back and to have their interest at heart. And I think that's a winning strategy. It's also the right thing to do. It's nice when those things overlap. And I would say just very quickly, the three main Senate Democrats, so I think like we got to be paying attention to here. Diane Feinstein, who's evolved on this a bit, and she's now far more critical than she was in her first comments about Haspel.

Number two is Mark Warner, who heads the Intelligence Committee on the Democratic side. We don't know much about how he feels about this. He's got a very important role to play in consolidating the caucus. And then third is Bill Nelson, who's probably offered the most kind of supportive comments of Haspel to date on record. And I think those three individuals to me are the ones that I would be watching very closely. And that's who folks should lobby if you care deeply. I think that'd be a good start. Okay. Fasjikir, the National Political Director of the American Civil Liberties Union. Thank you for the work you guys are doing.

If folks want to support the ACLU, what should they do? Where should they go? Well, I appreciate that. It's ACLU.org. We appreciate you volunteering. and signing up to be part of our organizing base at peoplepower.org, and we'll get you signed up

and ask you to go do stuff on behalf of civil rights and civil liberties in America. And maybe make a donation, make it monthly recurring, you know? We'll never stop you for me. What's a couple bucks to you? All right, that's great. Thank you for this conversation.

I'm really glad we talked to the Haskell nomination. We also talked about all these sort of legacy issues because, you know what? They're still hanging over our politics, what, 15, 16 years later, and it's not good. Yeah, I really enjoyed it. Thank you, Tommy.

Thank you to Fas Shakur for joining me today, and thank you to all of you guys for listening. If you like the show, please rate and review us in the iTunes store and share it with your friends. I would appreciate it. Have a good one.