Today, Explained - "We tortured some folks"

Episode Date: May 8, 2018

Tomorrow is the Senate confirmation hearing for Gina Haspel, President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the C.I.A. The 33-year veteran of the organization would be its first female director, but standing in her way are reports of her involvement in torture programs and secret prisons after September 11. Vox’s Jenn Williams explains Haspel’s shadowy history, and why she almost backed out of her nomination. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

All right, Sean, here we are. Here we are at Mattress Firm. I think it's locked. Did you check the hours before we came here? Oh, whoops. Oh, no. Oh, man. All right. Well, what should we do now? I don't know. Go to mattressfirm.com slash podcast and use the coupon code podcast10 to get 10% off a mattress. Should we just do that? I mean, but then you never get to try them, right?

It's true. I never did get to try them. I just got to watch you enjoy trying them. I do want to do that. Should we try another mattress firm? I know the next one. It's just a few miles down the road. Okay. I guess we're taking a long walk. Jen Williams, Deputy Foreign and National Security Editor here at Vox. Welcome. Hi.

Gina Haspel, not exactly a household name, but about to be one. Who is she? Right. So she is President Donald Trump's pick to be the next director of the CIA. She's 61 years old. She's a she. She would be the first female director of the CIA. Haspel has worked at the CIA for 33 years and spent most of her career undercover. Looking forward to it. Her first day in the agency's counterterrorism center was, faithfully, September 11, 2001. So almost a second after it was announced that Gina Haspel would be the candidate to replace Mike Pompeo, who's now Secretary of State, this information that she may have presided over this black site in Thailand came up, like in 2002.

What is a black site? So a black site was this kind of creation during the Bush administration, the war on terror, right? We, meaning the U.S. military and the U.S. government, needed a place to take prisoners of war that they captured, terrorists or suspected terrorists, and they needed a place to put them where they could, to put it bluntly, torture people. And they didn't want to do it in U.S. jurisdiction because then they would have to, you know, follow U.S. law. Sure. I mean, even the existence of these sites was secret for a long time.

And she oversaw the probably most notorious of all the black sites, this one in Thailand. And that's where the horrific torture of several individuals, including someone called Abu Zubaydah, occurs. Abu Zubaydah was a logistician for al-Qaeda. Even though he did not ever formally join the group and never pledged fealty to Osama bin Laden, he was the group's logistician.

If you were an al-Qaeda fighter and you wanted to go home, you needed a passport, maybe a ticket, Abu Zubaydah was the guy. So he was certainly involved, but he was not the monster that the White House wanted Americans to believe. So we're talking waterboarding. We're talking throwing him up against a wall repeatedly, stress positions.

At one point, they locked him in a tiny wooden coffin that he couldn't, like, move or breathe, barely in for hours at a time. So horrific treatment. And there's proof of this? Oh, yeah, absolutely. So this is all documented in the 2014 Senate Intel Committee report. So the Senate Intelligence Committee, Dianne Feinstein oversaw that, did this massive report, right?

This kind of backward-looking, what the hell happened. Yeah. Now, the Senate Intel Committee report that you can go and, like, download the PDF and read online, like, that is the small redacted version of the real actual report. I see. So we say redacted, right? Like, they took a big black marker and crossed out everybody's names. Problem is, they crossed out everybody's names. Yeah. Problem is they crossed out everybody's names.

So we don't know Gina Haspel's name is in there or not. Huh. But it has been reported in multiple locations, multiple places, independently reported that she was overseeing this black site either on or around the time that Abu Zubaydah or other individuals were tortured. Now, there's a whole nother issue we haven't even talked about that's kind of related to the black site and related to the torture, but not about her doing the torture or overseeing it. It has to do with videotapes. Videotapes. Actual old school VHS black videotapes that you put in your VCR. And you have to remember for people who didn't live through the post 9-11 war on terror, the American military and the CIA had no idea what the hell to do. And so they literally were making this stuff up as they went along.

They were basically told by the Bush administration, take the gloves off. Seriously, we just got hit on 9-11. Let's just let's just do this. And they were videotaping what they were doing. So they were videotaping what they were doing, which, you know, they were like, OK, well, we're going to have to replicate this. Let's videotape it. We'll go through, look at our techniques, see what happens, you know, they were like, okay, well, we're going to, you know, have to replicate this. Let's videotape it. We'll go through, look at our techniques, see what happens, you know.

And again, you have evidence of what they said, what they didn't say. But it's not like this stuff was ever going to be used in a court of law. They knew they were torturing him. So this would never be admissible in any court. But they videotaped it. They pretty soon realized, hey, maybe that wasn't the best idea. Yeah. You know, all this stuff about black sites and torture started coming out.

The CIA has these black sites, secret prison cells around the world in which we are disappearing people in the war on terror. Approximately 100 people have been disappeared, according to the Washington Post story, into these so-called black sites. And they were like, shit, we should probably get rid of those tapes, I'm thinking, because it's war crimes that we have documented evidence of us doing. That's bad. We could go to prison in The Hague.

So they destroyed the tapes of the black site, of the torture of Abu Zubaydah and other people. And by they, I mean Gina Haspel. Okay, so they destroy all the tapes. How does all of this come to light then? So they declassified and released this 2011 secret disciplinary review. So this kind of internal review they did kind of after the fact, right? So, you know, we're out of the Bush administration now, but there's still all this kind of reckoning that needs to be done, right? The Senate Intelligence Committee report didn't even come out until 2014.

Right. So, you know, that's just four years ago. So there's all this kind of internal, like, reckoning of who did what and, you know, who's to blame and who should be fired and who needs to stay. Okay. This review found that the decision to destroy the tapes was not made by Gina Haspel, but by her boss, Jose Rodriguez. So he was to blame. He was the one who issued the order. She, being the good soldier, just doing her job, then followed through and made sure those tapes got destroyed.

Right. So she's not to blame, according to this internal review. Okay. The CIA issued a letter of reprimand to Jose Rodriguez, to her boss, you know, for his behavior, you know, drafting an order to her to essentially destroy these tapes. She drafted the cable on his behalf saying, hey, we got to destroy these tapes. Right. Yeah.

She, according to the CIA officials, is not to blame because she was just a good soldier. And in fact, that actually goes to why some people in the CIA still support her and have come out in support of her for CIA director. Right. She's very popular amongst the rank and file I've read. She is among some, right? Not everyone, right? You know, a lot of people in the cia this is the darkest kind of era of the cia or one of the darkest in their history right but you know a lot

of them the people who were involved at the cia feel like look our our president you know president vice president at the very top they told us they ordered us you know we were at war we had just been hit by 9-11 they ordered us to take the gloves off we did what us, you know, we were at war. We had just been hit by 9-11. They ordered us to take the gloves off. We did what we could. You know, we did what we were told. We asked them, is this legal? They gave us legal, you know, briefing saying, hold her accountable for something that she was just told to do as, you know, not fair. Right. And they want to kind of rally around her and go, no, she was a soldier out there fighting and trying to catch terrorists and stop terror attacks. Yeah. You know, she's not a monster.

She's a patriot. And that is kind of where the dichotomy is here. Like, that's the struggle that we're trying to kind of tease out and that the Senate is going to try to get to the bottom of. You mentioned that the country, the government, the intelligence community was still sort of reckoning for torture that happened after 9-11 as late as 2014. Is this Gina Haspel hearing like a continuation of that reckoning? Or has there been sort of a really pivotal moment where someone owned this and said this was a mistake and we're sorry?

So at the CIA, there never really was that reckoning. So the big dramatic American apology reckoning for torture was Obama standing up in front of a microphone and basically shrugging and saying, we tortured some folks. We did some things that were contrary to our values. And that was the first time that the U.S. government had openly admitted and used the word torture and said, yes, we tortured people. So so that was like the big yes, we admitted it. We took responsibility. But it's not like Obama took responsibility for it himself. He wasn't president at the time.

And, you know, he immediately issued executive orders and did all these things to try to make sure mostly that it couldn't happen again. Although it very easily very well could because executive orders can easily just be changed by the president. And he didn't actually like Congress didn't actually pass any special laws to make sure this would never happen again. But at the CIA, there was no single person at all held accountable for this. In terms of nobody went to jail. Nobody went to prison. Nobody had a public hearing being prosecuted for terrorism. Nobody was called to the International Criminal Court in The Hague to stand trial for war crimes, for torture.

You know, nobody faced any accountability. And that's the problem. So, yes, this is still like the lingering kind of reckoning that this country is dealing with. You know, it was actually kind of shocking when Gina Haspel's name was announced. Whether or not she directly oversaw torture is the big question. But she was the one, her name is on the cable. We have the cables that show, you know, Gina Haspel issued these cables to destroy evidence

of torture. That's not kind of up for debate at all. That's not up for debate. Gina Haspel heads to the Senate for her confirmation hearings tomorrow, but it seems like she doesn't really want to go. That's in a thought. I'm just spitballing here. And again, no judgments, no blame for bringing us to a matches firm really early in the morning. My bad.

Okay, fair, fair. Thanks for owning it. If we get to this next matches firm, they too might still be closed. I mean, I don't want to make any assumptions. I feel like we should just check and see. Yeah, it looks like they open at 10 a.m., which is reasonable. We can go there at 10, but we'll have to make it snappier.

You got any ideas on how we can get there faster than, let's say, walking a mile? Oh, man. Well, I mean, we could take maybe one of these little scooters that are lying around all over Washington, D.C. Oh, snap. There are two scooters that are lying around all over Washington, D.C. Oh, snap. There are two scooters right at Logan Circle. Do you know where Logan Circle is? Yeah, yeah.

I know where that is. Do you want to go get them? Why not? We're not that far away. So this almost didn't happen, this Gina Haspel confirmation hearing. I hear she maybe, like, wanted to pull herself out of Senate confirmation hearings? Right. So it turns out that last Friday she met with some White House officials to kind of talk through some of the issues she might face during her confirmation hearing.

Okay. And it seems, from what the Washington Post reported, that she proceeded to go back to Langley, to the CIA headquarters, to her office, and freak the fuck out. And basically, like, I don't know if I'm going to get confirmed. I don't want to drag my name, the Trump administration, or the CIA, like, through the mud. Maybe I should just withdraw. And some senior officials at the White House, including Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Mark

Short, who's the head of legislative affairs, they proceeded to haul ass over to Langley and spend several hours talking her back into it. According to the Washington Post, even after that, they weren't entirely sure that she was going to stick with her nomination until Saturday. Trump apparently found out about all this drama on Friday while he was on his trip to Dallas to talk to the NRA. He apparently decided that, like, at first he'd be like, well, I'm okay with whatever she thinks,

but then apparently was like, oh, I'm just going to support her. So apparently, as of Monday, it seems like her nomination is going ahead. And then as of yesterday, she was on Capitol Hill meeting with senators for these kind of pre-interview interviews before she actually goes to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee. So it looks like it's happening. So how is she going to do tomorrow? Do we know whether she's actually got a chance of being confirmed? So Senator John McCain, Republican senator from Arizona, was tortured as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. Right.

Obviously has a bit of an issue with torture and people who do it. So he has kind of been leading the charge of, hey, you need to answer for this. Right. And he wrote this letter saying, you know, I need you to answer this list of questions. Did you oversee interrogations at this place? Did you, you know, were you engaged in? Did you oversee, you know, were you involved in waterboarding? You know, enhanced interrogation, because that's what the government called it at the time. And it's not just him, it's democrats and republicans but cia released some just recently released some biographical details because everyone's literally scrambling like who the hell is this lady and if you see her she looks like what you would think the complete

unassuming spy woman would look like right look her up right. She has kind of mousy brown hair. She looks like she could be your sixth grader's principal. I was going to say. She looks just like a random lady who passes on the street and whose face you would forget within a minute. Ouch. No, but that's a good thing in what you're doing. If you're in clandestine operations, you do not want people to know your face. Interesting. You want to blend in it's a very

big assets one of the reasons why i'm not a spy because good gut you're covered in tats good luck forgetting me ever uh so yeah and that's kind of the problem right is that we didn't have this information on her and i say we i don't mean we reporters or we just the american people i mean the senate intelligence, whose literal job is to oversee the activities of the intelligence community. They're the ones requesting this information. And they're really mad because they feel like the CIA is stonewalling them. If she's not allowed to say anything about her past and her experiences in the CIA and the work she did, then are senators likely to get any more

clarity than they already don't have? That's the big question, right? So senators, especially senators on the Senate Intelligence Committee, are given access to classified information. They are representatives of the American people, right? Yeah. They will, you know, ask the questions. And we've seen this in other hearings, right? And they will say, you know, Gina may say, I can't answer that in a public setting that's classified, but I'd be happy to address it a little bit more in close session.

It's possible they would do that, especially with someone as sensitive as this. But. Dianne Feinstein, right, so she was the lead author essentially of the 2014 Senate Intelligence Committee report. She is really, really pushing the CIA to go ahead and declassify stuff. So we don't even have to talk about the classified information. Tell us what she did, where she was, what she was involved in. And so they kind of did. So at the end of March, they released some biographical details about Gina Haspel, including that she likes Johnny Cash, which that totally is what everyone needed to know.

Give her the job. Yeah, sold. You torture someone, that's cool. Johnny Cash is the man in black. You're the woman in the black site. Let's do it. The sergeant put me in a cell then he went home for the night.

I said, come back here, you so-and-so. I ain't being treated right. Well, they're bound to get you. But there's not a lot of detail. There's nothing about did she or did she not literally run this black site. Yeah. Considering her background

and these murky torture waters that she's in, obviously not the strongest choice. You could find someone who has a less controversial background. Right. So why do we think President Trump chose her? When Trump was on the campaign trail, he said, I would bring back waterboarding,

and I'd bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding. By taking someone who, you know, has this kind of murky background and someone that many in the CIA see as this official who, you know, was in the trenches fighting in the war on terror and saying, look, I'm going to put this person in charge, really sends a clear message to the CIA that like, we're going to really just take the gloves off again. It seems like a pretty big boys club. What does it mean that she might be the first ever female executive? I mean, from a straight up, you know, feminist perspective, if you're just looking at

the gender selection, it's great. However, that said, to have a female who may or may not have tortured humans, that's not feminism. That's not what feminism was about. It's not, let's get the best woman we can to also do terrible things. I know for a fact there are plenty of qualified women in the CIA who weren't involved in the torture interrogation program. So, yes, it's good that a woman is potentially going to head the CIA. It's not great that this woman is going to potentially head the CIA. Jen Williams is the co-host of The Worldly Podcast at Vox. I'm Sean here at Logan Circle. We've found two scooters.

We're about to hop on them and head to Mattress Firm. Sounds good to me. I think we'll make it just on time. I'm a little worried about your safety holding that microphone and recording these ads. I'm a nimble man. All right, dear listener, get ready for the windiest mattress ads you've ever heard. This could have been easier if we had just gone to mattressfirm.com slash podcast. So glad you remembered the website.