New CIA Documents Add To Questions About What Gina Haspel Knew About The Torture Program
Source: Buzzfeed News
“He was under ‘enhanced measures’ when he made these claims and simply told his interrogators what he thought they wanted to hear.”
Posted on May 8, 2018, at 12:05 p.m.
Emma Loop
BuzzFeed News Reporter
Jason Leopold
BuzzFeed News Reporter
Washington, DC
Reporting From
Washington, DC
As Gina Haspel, President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the CIA, faces a Senate grilling about her role in the agency’s post-9/11 torture program, nearly 300 pages of newly declassified CIA documents give an unprecedented look at the chaotic early days of the agency’s so-called rendition, detention, and interrogation program — including a time when Haspel helped oversee it.
The mastermind of the 9/11 attacks lied and fabricated information to avoid torture, the documents show. Another detainee provided key information before being subjected to the some of the harshest torture techniques, such as waterboarding — and interrogators kept torturing him even after they determined he very likely had no more new threat information to give.
The CIA documents released to BuzzFeed News are heavily redacted and do not mention Haspel by name, but they largely cover the years immediately following the Sept. 11 attacks, some of which Haspel spent working at the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, which oversaw the torture program. According to the CIA, Haspel was a deputy group chief at the CTC from 2001 to 2003 and was a senior-level supervisor at the CTC from 2003 to 2004.
The documents pertain heavily to the torturous treatment in 2003 of alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, as well as Abu Zubaydah, the CIA’s first high-value captive who was held at a black site prison in Thailand in 2002. Haspel briefly ran the black site a couple of months after Abu Zubaydah's torture ended. She took over the management of the prison in October 2002, shortly before another detainee, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the alleged mastermind of the USS Cole bombing, was rendered there and tortured. According to someone familiar with what Haspel has told senators in private meetings, “it was not until October 2002 that she was briefed on some of the agency's more sensitive counterterrorism authorities and activities. Contrary to some descriptions in the press, she did not devise these activities nor advocate for their approval.”
Read more: https://www.buzzfeed.com/emmaloop/as-gina-haspel-heads-into-her-confirmation-hearing-new?utm_term=.wj3xggb7X#.rlJ6QQXA8
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