'She Should Be in Jail'-Rights Groups Rally to Stop Torture Overseer Turned CIA Pick Gina Haspel

[DonViejo]

‘She Should Be in Jail’—Rights Groups Rally to Stop Torture Overseer Turned Trump CIA Pick Gina Haspel

To civil liberties groups, approving Haspel would tell a generation of CIA officers ‘that torture, or other activity outside the bounds of the law, is not a career-killer.’

SPENCER ACKERMAN
03.14.18 10:00 PM ET

There were no legal consequences when Gina Haspel oversaw the torture of two men at a secret CIA prison in Thailand 16 years ago. There were no legal consequences 13 years ago when Haspel aided in the destruction of 92 videotapes showing Abu Zubaydah and Abdul Rahim Nashiri’s torture. But now that Haspel is two Senate votes away from running the CIA, a coalition of civil liberties groups is gearing up to ensure that she will at least face political consequences.

Those groups tell The Daily Beast that they intend to fight Haspel intensely. Their plans are still coming together, and their goal is ambitious: to defeat a CIA director with substantial agency support nominated by a Republican president before a Republican-controlled Senate. But this is a fight they feel compelled to wage, having spent Barack Obama’s presidency loudly warning that without prosecutions for torture, it will be a matter of time before torture returns.

“Gina Haspel dishonored our country and disgraced herself by participating in the CIA torture program and the destruction of criminal evidence,” said Wells Dixon of the Center on Constitutional Rights, who is playing a leading role in the emerging effort to block Haspel’s directorship. “We do not believe she should be director of the CIA. Rather, she should be in jail.”

Civil liberties groups tend not to win these sorts of congressional fights. But they see Haspel as so directly implicated in waterboarding, mock executions and the persistent physical and mental consequences of those acts that she might prove to be the exception.

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