In a saner country, someone like Gina Haspel would be in prison. Haspel personally supervised the waterboarding and torture of several suspects at CIA “black sites” in the Third World during the Bush Administration during its vicious torture program that followed the 9/11 attacks. Several of these waterboarding sessions were videotaped. However, she also ordered the video evidence destroyed. So she isn’t only a torturer, she violates the law in other important respects. However, in February 2009 President Obama traveled to CIA headquarters in Langley Virginia to assure agents like her that they would not face any kind of prosecution because the United States needed to “look forward, not backward” relative to torture under the Bush administration. She managed to rise to the number two position at the CIA, and now that the current CIAdirector Mike Pompeo is being transferred up to Secretary of State to replace Rex Tillerson, she will become the first woman, and the first known torturer, to run a federal agency. It’s true the Democrats might decide not to confirm her. But history suggests that they will be satisfied with asking a few pointed questions during her confirmation hearings and then signing off on her.
Gina Haspel Is About To Make History As The First Woman And Torturer To Run The CIA
6 Comments. Leave new
“… the first known torturer …”
Ha ha! Exactly what I was thinking!
Lynndie England
Oh, yeah – women everywhere are stepping into roles formerly held exclusively by men. But at least Lynndie served time rather than getting promoted to the head of the best-funded spy shop on the planet.
You’re forgetting William E. Colby, who prior to becoming Director of the CIA in 1973, ran it’s Phoenix Program in Vietnam, which involved the torture and assassination of thousands of South Vietnamese individuals between 1965 and 1972 (40,000+ were murdered by Phoenix in one estimate). It’s all documented and exposed in Douglas Valentine’s ‘The Phoenix Program,’ relying on interviews from the CIA officers involved, including Colby himself. Hassle’s crimes are small ball in comparison, as she was a subordinate to Jose Rodriguez, who coordinated the whole “enhanced interrogation” program worldwide. Also, the methods used in Vietnam were more brutal, including the systematic rape of prisoners.
Methods of reported torture that author Douglas Valentine wrote were used at the interrogation centers included:
Rape, gang rape, rape using eels, snakes, or hard objects, and rape followed by murder; electric shock (‘the Bell Telephone Hour’) rendered by attaching wires to the genitals or other sensitive parts of the body, like the tongue; the ‘water treatment’; the ‘airplane’ in which the prisoner’s arms were tied behind the back, and the rope looped over a hook on the ceiling, suspending the prisoner in midair, after which he or she was beaten; beatings with rubber hoses and whips; the use of police dogs to maul prisoners.[20][22]
Military intelligence officer K. Barton Osborne reports that he witnessed the following use of torture:
The use of the insertion of the 6-inch dowel into the canal of one of my detainee’s ears, and the tapping through the brain until dead. The starvation to death (in a cage), of a Vietnamese woman who was suspected of being part of the local political education cadre in one of the local villages…The use of electronic gear such as sealed telephones attached to…both the women’s vaginas and men’s testicles [to] shock them into submission.[23]
The reported torture was carried out by South Vietnamese forces with the CIA and special forces playing a supervisory role.[24]
[20] Valentine, Douglas (2014) [1990]. The Phoenix Program: America’s Use of Terror in Vietnam. Forbidden Bookshelf. Open Road Media. ISBN 978-1-4976-2020-9.
[23] Allen, Joe & Pilger, John (2008). Vietnam: the (last) war the U.S. lost. Haymarket Books. p. 164. ISBN 978-1-931859-49-3.
[24] Harbury, Jennifer (2005). Truth, torture, and the American way: the history and consequences of U.S. involvement in torture. Beacon Press. p. 97. ISBN 978-0-8070-0307-7
How can you tell the difference between the good guys and the bad guys when they both act the same way?