Haspel Will Have to Promise Not to Use Enhanced Interrogation

Gina Haspel, President Donald Trump’s choice to be the director of the CIA, is scheduled to give a pledge in front of senators during her confirmation hearing on Wednesday, vowing that she is not going to restart the controversial interrogation program she was running after 9/11 if she’s confirmed as the agency’s director.

According to a new report obtained by The Washington Post, excerpts of her prepared remarks show that Haspel will seek to preemptively assure the Senate Intelligence Committee that she has no plans to reimplement the brutal enhanced interrogation techniques used by the agency years ago to question terror suspects.

Haspel has been under hard criticism from many lawmakers, mostly Democrats, for her ties to the interrogation program, particularly regarding her running a black site detention facility in Thailand in 2002, where a suspected al-Qaeda operative was waterboarded.

According to her prepared remarks, Haspel plans to emphasize her “personal commitment, clearly and without reservation,” not to restart the interrogation program, the Post reported.

Haspel has also come under fire from lawmakers amid questions about the extent of her involvement in a decision to destroy videotapes of interrogations while she was serving as chief of staff to former CIA Director Jose Rodriguez.

Rodriguez was the one who ordered the tapes destroyed.

Within the CIA itself, Haspel is well regarded. On Tuesday, three dozen former national security officials and lawmakers signed onto a letter endorsing Haspel for the top CIA job, and the agency has aggressively lobbied to build public support for her nomination.

Meanwhile, Haspel is going to clarify things about her biography, according to excerpts of her prepared statement that read like the vague contours of a spy novel, the Post wrote.

“I recall my first foreign agent meeting was on a dark, moonless night with an agent I’d never met before,” Haspel is expected to say. “When I picked him up, he passed me the intelligence, and I passed him extra money for the men he led.”