SEN. JACK REED: Excuse me, madam, you seem to be saying that you were not following civilized norms and the law or anything else, when you were conducting those self-same activities, if that's the analogy you're going to draw.
GINA HASPEL: Sir, I'm sorry, can you -- I --
SEN. JACK REED: Very simple. You have an operations officer who is captured. He's being waterboarded. I've asked you, very simply: Would you determine that to be immoral and something that should never be done, condoned in any way, shape or form? Your response seems to be that civilized nations don't do it, but uncivilized nations do it, or uncivilized groups do it.
UNIDENTIFIED: The United States does it to the soldiers.
SEN. JACK REED: A civilized nation -- a civilized nation was doing it, until it was outlawed by this Congress.
GINA HASPEL: Senator, I would never, obviously, support inhumane treatment of any CIA officers.
AMY GOODMAN: And let's turn to Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine questioning Gina Haspel.
SEN. SUSAN COLLINS: As a candidate, President Trump repeatedly expressed his support for waterboarding. In fact, he said we should go beyond waterboarding. So, if the CIA has a high-value terrorism suspect in its custody, and the president gave you a direct order to waterboard that suspect, what would you do?
GINA HASPEL: Senator, I would advise -- I do not believe the president would ask me to do that.
AMY GOODMAN: So, Gina Haspel doesn't believe that the president would ask her to do that. This is Donald Trump while he was running for president.
DONALD TRUMP: Don't tell me it doesn't work. Torture works. OK, folks? Torture -- you know, have these guys: "Torture doesn't work." Believe me, it works, OK? And waterboarding is your minor form. Some people say it's not actually torture. Let's assume it is. But they ask me the question: What do you think of waterboarding? Absolutely fine. But we should go much stronger than waterboarding. That's the way I feel.
AMY GOODMAN: "I would go much stronger than waterboarding," says President Trump. Jeremy Scahill?
JEREMY SCAHILL: You know, my question for anybody watching or listening right now is: When you hear the phrase "speaking truth to power," you know, who do you think of? You think of people like Martin Luther King. You think of, you know, activists. You think of people of conscience. That is the phrase that lawmakers, you know, the people that introduced her, former CIA directors -- they say, "Gina Haspel is the person that you want speaking truth to power." And there's this sort of hashtag #resistance view of Gina Haspel that exists, which is, "Well, Haspel already knows all of this stuff. She understands. She's been in the CIA for 30 years. She's going to be able to sort of do that dance with Trump and stand up to him." No. We already know how she views these. There were people that were interrogators that protested. There were CIA officers and State Department people who resigned. Gina Haspel followed the orders. And so, whether it is George Bush and Dick Cheney or it's Donald Trump, the track record of Gina Haspel is that she does what she's told, even if it's a heinous act of torture.
AMY GOODMAN: And what about the destruction of the videotapes? Explain what she did.
JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, first of all, Gina Haspel claimed, in this hearing, that there were 92 tapes and that it was 92 tapes of one individual. You know, Jason Leopold, who is a BuzzFeed news journalist that has done really incredible work FOIAing information -- he and Marcy Wheeler have tracked this stuff more than anyone else -- said that it was tapes of two individuals. Gina Haspel claims that they took the -- that they had these recordings, that there was concern because the program -- meaning the extraordinary rendition program and the black sites program -- had started to seep out into the media. It was being reported on in The Washington Post, New York Times, Sy Hersh, other people. And they said, "Oh, well, we can't have these things leaked, because it's going to put at risk the agents in the field."
And Haspel and her boss, Jose Rodriguez, who openly brags -- he goes on his book tours and stuff, openly brags that he jump-started the torture program, said it worked, etc. Haspel was his deputy at the time that these tapes were ordered destroyed. And Haspel had to actually draft the memo for Jose Rodriguez. Now, her defenders portray it as though she was like Rodriguez's secretary and was doing it. No, she was one of the people that ran the site where these tapes were filmed.
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