And she said, openly, in the hearing, which actually contradicted a lot of what her defenders said about her -- she said she absolutely supported destroying the tapes. Now, and then she's asked during the hearing -- now, mind you, this is someone who is up for CIA director. She is asked, "Why didn't you preserve a copy of it in a secure way? OK, we understand that you wanted to destroy any tapes that may have been not held securely. Why didn't you preserve a copy?" She says, "Oh, I'm not a technical person." Huh? You're not a technical person, and you're going to be the director of the CIA? This is what I'm saying. This whole thing is a PSYOP against us.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, let's turn to Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein of California questioning Gina Haspel yesterday.
SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN: Were you an advocate for destroying the tapes?
GINA HASPEL: Senator, I absolutely was an advocate, if we could within and conforming to U.S. law and if we could get policy concurrence to eliminate the security risk posed to our officers by those tapes. And the consistent legal --
SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN: And you were aware of what those tapes contained?
GINA HASPEL: No, I never watched the tapes.
SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN: No, but you --
GINA HASPEL: But I understood that our officers' faces were on them and that that was very dangerous at a time when there were unauthorized disclosures that were exposing the program.
SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN: But it also exposed how the program was conducted.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: So that's Gina Haspel responding to questions by Feinstein. I wanted to ask, Jeremy, given what you said earlier about the history of the CIA and their not only participation in programs of torture, but also intervening in other countries, overthrowing various governments, whether anyone in the CIA would not be complicit in what Gina Haspel has been complicit in, or variations of the same. And then, second, the point that Trump made about, you know, waterboarding and worse. What about the fact that the CIA, for worse things than waterboarding, principally rendered -- or, as you say, kidnapped -- detainees and sent them to places like Syria, Iraq, Jordan, etc., where they knew the torture would be much more brutal?
JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, first of all, yes, there are people who worked in the CIA -- a lot of people who worked in the CIA that I don't think you could say, "Oh, these people are responsible for torture." But even if we want to look at sort of -- and I'll answer that question directly in a second. But even if you want to look at sort of grades of involvement, Gina Haspel is like at the top. You know, she was one of the people who was running one of the early sites where the United States was doing this. So, it's clear that -- and the fact that she refuses to call it immoral or to say that the tactics that the senators were specifically citing was torture -- she kept saying, "Well, you know, we got this valuable information. Uh, it's a mystery. I don't know. Maybe it was attributable to that, maybe it wasn't."
But, you know, in general, the CIA is divided into two big camps. I mean, there's lots of little nuance, but two big camps: the analytical side and the operations side. The operations side is sort of the dark side, the Dick Cheney view of it. Those are the people that were conducting the operations that Gina Haspel was involved with. Then you have people that are on the analytical side. And those were the people that the neocons said was like a liberal think tank. They would have been the people that were pushing back internally against, for instance, the information that was put in front of Colin Powell when he went to the United Nations to sell the Iraq War for the Bush administration. Ray McGovern, who was dragged out of that hearing and had his arm dislocated, you know, this is a man who's almost 80 years old. Ray McGovern came out of the analytical division at the CIA. Glenn Carle, another person who was also a CIA interrogator -- he actually was on the operations side -- was against torture and spoke out about torture.
So, you know, I certainly don't mean to be heaping any praise on the CIA. But to directly answer your question: of course. And there were people that were very seriously protesting, including people who were in the same position as Gina Haspel after her, who were saying, "Uh-uh, this is not right."
AMY GOODMAN: What do you feel is the critical question that wasn't asked, as we wrap up?
JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, I think that the Democrats should have shut the entire thing down and refused to participate anymore until Gina Haspel answered the question about is waterboarding torture, and not get into some legalistic thing of what John Yoo, a man who would justify all manner of torture and say, "Well, anything short of killing them is not actually torture"--
AMY GOODMAN: Who's at UC Berkeley Law School.
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