Top CIA Lawyer in 2014: Haspel Ran "the Interrogation Program"
Source: The Daily Beast
Long before Donald Trump ever nominated Gina Haspel to run the CIA, a memoir from a former CIA top attorney contained a line with the power to do serious damage to her chances.
Haspels informal nomination ran into immediate jeopardy last month over her 2002 supervision of the agencys first secret black-site prison, located in Thailand, where two early detainees, Abu Zubaydah and Abdul Rahim al-Nashiri, were tortured. (She directly ran the black site, though after Zubaydahs most intense period of torture that year.)
But in his 2014 book, John Rizzo, a longtime senior CIA lawyer, indicated that Haspel was responsible for the incommunicado detention and torture not of two men, but of dozens, potentially. Former intelligence officials interviewed by The Daily Beast have portrayed Haspels experience similarly.
Rizzo, in his memoir, Company Man, looked back on his time in a Langley controversy he likened to a big turd dumped on my desk: the fateful November 2005 decision, made by Haspels then-boss Jose Rodriguez with her support, to destroy 92 videotapes depicting the 2002 torture of Zubaydah and al-Nashiri.
Read more: https://www.thedailybeast.com/top-cia-lawyer-in-2014-haspel-ran-the-interrogation-program