Gina Haspel Said Only One Detainee's Torture Was Taped. She's Wrong.
Donald Trump’s chosen CIA chief claimed the torture tapes she helped destroy showed one detainee’s torture. But she oversaw the torture of a second taped detainee.
SPENCER ACKERMAN
05.15.18 4:27 AM ET
It seemed like a small misstatement, the sort anyone makes from time to time, but it might augur much for Gina Haspel’s relationship with the truth as Donald Trump’s potential next CIA director.
All the available evidence, to include declassified CIA documents, indicates that two detainees had their torture at the hands of the CIA recorded on 92 agency videotapes in 2002 at a black site Haspel eventually ran. The vast majority of the tapes showed Abu Zubaydah’s torture. A few showed the torture of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, whose waterboarding and other torture occurred under Haspel’s command as chief of base at the Thailand secret prison she ran between October and December 2002.
Three years later, Haspel, aiding her boss Jose Rodriguez, drafted a cable instructing subordinates to destroy the tapes, despite resistance elsewhere within CIA leadership and George W. Bush’s administration. But Haspel, during her confirmation hearing last week, revised that history. She said only a single detainee’s torture was videotaped, when in fact there were two detainees treated in such a fashion. Though at least one senator has asked Haspel to correct the record, she hasn’t yet done so. The CIA subsequently implied that Haspel may be right, despite years of public evidence, including its own documents, to the contrary.
It started during an exchange with Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who spearheaded the Senate intelligence committee’s landmark investigation of the CIA torture program. Feinstein herself initially misstated a basic fact about the tapes, saying incorrectly that 92 detainees were shown tortured on the tapes, rather than 92 tapes existed showing the torture of two detainees.
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