Imagine you are charged with the responsibility to hire the right person for a highly sensitive job. This job requires moral courage under pressure and an unswerving commitment to American values and laws, all while making life and death decisions on a daily basis.
Your decision will do more than fill a job opening: It will send a potent signal to a global network of employees and critical allies. The wrong choice will embolden your organization’s enemies to use it as a recruiting tool for those who wish to destroy it.
Wouldn’t you want to know everything you possibly could about any finalist you interview for the job? Your own job performance, after all, will be measured at least in part by the choice you make.
U.S. Sens. Susan Collins and Angus King of Maine face this challenge right now. As members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, they must judge whether President Donald Trump’s nominee to become the next director of the CIA, Gina Haspel, is qualified for the job.
Haspel has spent her career at CIA. Almost all of her 30 year record there is still classified, and the CIA is refusing to release more than a few pages of information about her. The public knows almost nothing about her. Even those charged with the heavy responsibility of voting on her nomination may not be given the necessary information to make the right decision.
One of the few facts known about Haspel raises deep concern: She was the supervisor of a CIA “black site” overseas during a time when at least one detainee there was repeatedly waterboarded, a form of torture that simulates drowning. Other forms of torture — “walling,” where detainees are slammed against a wall with an improvised collar, forced nudity and containment boxes — were known to occur at this site, though her role is still classified. Concerns have also been raised about her involvement with the destruction of CIA videotapes documenting the torture of detainees.
Maine’s senators have a proud record of opposing torture, which, as Collins has said, “is deplorable and is completely contrary to our values as Americans.” Collins’ repeated votes opposing cruel and inhumane treatment of detainees go back to at least 2005. She and King voted in 2014 to release 500 pages of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the use of torture. In 2015, both voted with a bipartisan majority of 78 senators to strengthen the legal prohibition on torture by U.S. agencies, including the CIA.
Direct operational and policy involvement with the horrible aberration that was the CIA torture program ought to disqualify a person to be CIA director. This is an essentially conservative position: It stands against any hint of return to one of the darkest periods of our recent history. It upholds America’s historic position that torture is immoral and illegal. As for the defense of “just following orders,” America has rejected that argument since at least the end of World War II.
Now is the time to hold that line. Our president has said he’d like to “bring back” the torture program. It took over a decade to begin to get the facts about the torture program and strengthen the law against torture so those in the field who defend and protect us have clear guidance.
This nomination raises questions that must be answered. The stakes are high, and we need to get this “hire” right.
More than 100 retired U.S. generals and flag officers recently signed an open letter to the Senate saying they are “deeply troubled by” this nomination, which would send a “terrible signal” and “undermine our national security.” They argue it increases risks to our troops, hinders cooperation with allies and provides a propaganda tool for extremists.
All of this was true of the torture program itself, as our Maine senators have repeatedly recognized.
Beyond the very real security risks, it ought to be morally clear that high-level involvement with the now-repudiated torture program disqualifies a nominee from directing the agency now. At the very least, don’t we deserve — and aren’t our leaders obliged — to know the truth and to read the applicant’s whole resume before saying “you’re hired”?
Rev. Jill Saxby is a former executive director of the Maine Council of Churches and was a member of the board of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, an interfaith organization based in Washington, D.C. She lives in Cape Elizabeth.
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