While the U.S. has signed several international treaties barring torture, both civilian and intelligence agency officials involved in the U.S. torture program have never been held accountable for their crimes. With Trump’s nomination of Gina Haspel, the U.S. Senate will have a new opportunity to debate America’s use of torture during upcoming confirmation hearings. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Jeffrey Kaye, a retired clinical psychologist and independent journalist who has written extensively about torture. Here, Kaye examines issues or international law and morality surrounding Haspel’s nomination.
JEFFREY KAYE: We don’t know everything about her. Most of the stuff is classified. I know people are asking senators or asking for a full declassification of documents. Taking my sources from the Senate Select Committee of Intelligence’s report on the CIA and the New York Times account (and) other accounts that have been written, she was at least for a brief period of time at the end of 2002 in charge of a CIA blacksite prison in Thailand known as Cat’s Eye.
And this was during the time that one of the prisoners there, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri was waterboarded at least three times and tortured in other ways by the CIA. So she was involved in that, that we know of. And then secondarily, a few years later, she’d been promoted and now was chief of staff to Jose Rodriguez, who was the director of the counterintelligence service for the CIA. And the two of them kind of brainstormed how to destroy – she as a big proponent purportedly of destroying the videotapes of the torture of both al-Nashiri and earlier, of Abu Zabayda, an early prisoner at the CIA Thailand blacksite.
This of course was a destruction of evidence of torture. So she covered up torture, and according to other people, she was quite the proponent of torture as well. John Kiriakou, who was a CIA agent in that part of the world at that time, was involved in the capture of Abu Zabayda, claims in an article recently that people inside the CIA called her “Bloody Gina” because of her proclivity for torture.
That’s who we’re dealing with and that’s who Donald Trump has nominated to be the director of the CIA. And the importance of this is, we now have somebody who literally is – if the reports are true – in fact, a torturer to be the head of the CIA.
BETWEEN THE LINES: Summarize for us, if you would, the laws that are violated by the CIA and the government that ordered the torture or authorized it, George W. Bush’s administration. What are the essential things we need to know regarding the illegality of torture, regardless of the political rhetoric on one side or the other?
JEFFREY KAYE: Right. During the Reagan administration, Reagan administration, later Bush administration officials helped in the drafting of an international treaty that went through the United Nations and that treaty became known as the Convention Against Torture. And the United States is a signatory to that treaty.
In other words, the Convention Against Torture is the law of the United States. So our Constitution is written. If you know, you sign a treaty, it becomes actually, a part of your law. And so whether you consider it domestic or international law, there are laws against the use of torture and cruel and inhumane forms of treatment because the United States is also a signatory to the Geneva Conventions, which also have portions of it about the use of torture. And that, in fact, the United Stations, even at this very moment and even under the Obama administration, was in violation of this treaty.
BETWEEN THE LINES: You have said of Gina Haspel’s nomination – describing it as a moral depravity – what should Congress do here? What are their responsibilities in handling this nomination by Donald Trump of a known and documented torturer?
JEFFREY KAYE: Well, they’ve asked for the documentation of Gina Haspel and I’m all for the release of documents. That’s what I’m really all about. If they can use this nomination to get further release of details of the torture policies that went on during the Bush-Cheney administration of the CIA or any other current ones, I’m all for that.
That’s about all the good I can see coming from this. Of course, and reject outright her nomination. But that would just be the beginning of what they should be doing and this Congress is not going to take the further steps that need to be taken, which would be an investigation at least along the size and impact of the old Church Committee (known as the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities) and really, a full-scale investigation of what’s gone on in the past 20 years or so in relation to torture in the United States military and the CIA. There’s been some investigations; they should release the entire Senate Select Committee report, of which we only got the executive summary. Thousands of pages, I believe, are still to be released. Thousands of documents. We want to know the truth and that’s what people should be asking for.
BETWEEN THE LINES: That prompts one more question here. What signal will the Republican-controlled Senate send to the world if they confirm Donald Trump’s nomination of Gina Haspel?
JEFFREY KAYE: If they confirm Gina Haspel, the signal to the world is that the United States’ claims of being any kind of moral force in the world are a farce, they’re a lie, and they should not be followed, period. That would be it.
The United States will have given up any pretense that it stands for anything moral anymore because it’s embraced the worst type of torture that there is.
See Jeffrey Kaye’s blog, “Invictus: A blog on U.S. Politics and the Fight Against Torture.” See his author page at Truthout.org.
